Was working on a Dell PC that had a failed Seagate hard drive. The drive would spin up but could not be detected by the system. I was able to order a new drive and get the PC back up and running. However there were tons of photos and documents that need to be recovered if possible. I found that some Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 hard drives have known firmware bugs. There are two common errors.
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0 LBA error: it happens when your BIOS can recognize your HDD at POST moment, but as an 0MB drive.
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BSY error: it happens when your HDD enter on a halt state, or BuSY state. In this condition, your HDD will not be recognized by BIOS at POST moment.
The error I encountered was the BSY error, which is recoverable. But it requires connecting to the drives serial interface which is located next to the SATA connector.
I purchased the required RS232-to-TTL Adapter from eBay, followed one of the better sets of directions I found on Google and was able to recover all the data from the drive.
[more]
How to recover from BSY error - https://sites.google.com/site/seagatefix/
RS232-TTL Adapters on eBay - http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_trksid=p2047675.m570.l1313&_nkw=MAX232CPE+Transfer+Chip+RS232+To+TTL&_sacat=0&_from=R40