So, this description may be a long one...

First, the HDD info:
Brand: Seagate
Model: ST2000DM001
Controller Board: 100664987 Rev A
Capacity: 2TB

A family member (who is an author) recently had their HDD fail with many chapters of their book stored within the drive. Since I'm a EE, they figured that I should be able to fix it. I made no promises, but took a look at the drive. Here is what I have seen so far.

In Disk Manager, the disk shows up without any space that can be allocated or any volumes. Thus I am unable to assign drive letters and the like. As the subject mentions, when I look at it in the DiskPart utility it only shows up as 6656 Bytes without any partitions. I've used a hex reader to open the disk and it shows the MBR only with a total sector space of 13. Based on the research that I've done and having little to no knowledge about Hard Drives my only guess is that something is wrong with the controller board and the ROM needs to be transferred to a donor board. The HDD does not make any "clicking" sounds and seems to spin up fine. One last detail, I've used Seagates tools and found that it passes some of its SMART tests, but fails some others. I'm not quite sure which ones specifically.

Any help or insight would be greatly appreciated.

-Eric

Hello,

One suggestion would be to go into the Computer BIOS setup and see if you can manually set the drive specs (heads, cyl, sectors) instead of using the AUTO settings. How old is the mother board you are trying to connect it to? If it is too old it may not know how to deal with a 2 TB drive an you could try another computer and see what you get.

If it comes up and starts to see the drive correctly use a drive recovery program if you havve one. If not then I would download testdisk and photorec which are programs written by the air force to recover hard drive partitions and data.

Hope that helps.

Select your Hard drive in BIOS and dissable SMART. See whether your problem is solved. If not, delete all of your partitions and recreate them using a windows 8 disk..

I think it is better to format entire drive. .
In Linux you have to go to "Disk utility" or "Disk management" select the drive and select option format drive annd recreate partitions I dont know how to format drive in windows. .

commented: Formatting the drive will destroy data the poster is attempting to recover. +0
commented: Your 'In Linux' is too generic. Your method wouldn't work on most distros. OP also said they want to recover data; formatting wipes it all. -1
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