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I recently installed a firmware update on a Seagate Momentus (ST9750420AS) drive and everything looked fine. But after rebooting the BIOS can’t see it. The drive simply spins up and gives two long chirps. Is there any way for me to restore the older firmware? I’ve never messed with a hard drive PCB (Printed Circuit Board) before but I found an identical one here that got me wondering, is the firmware on the PCB? If so, would replacing the PCB revive my drive?

To troubleshoot I put it in another machine with the same results. It’s a Dell machine and I installed the update from Dell, plus I’ve verified the disk’s model number.

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    How old is the drive? If there's nothing important in it, and warranty would cover it, its probably worth seeing if you can RMA it
    – Journeyman Geek
    Mar 23, 2015 at 0:42
  • It's a 3 year old system with a 1 year warranty. I was tuning it up for a friend since it was running slow and I fixed the problem (hooray!) but now the hard drive's dead (boo). I really want it back!
    – Vimm
    Mar 23, 2015 at 1:03

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I’ve never messed with a hard drive PCB (Printed Circuit Board) before but I found an identical one here that got me wondering, is the firmware on the PCB? If so, would replacing the PCB revive my drive?

Yes, the firmware is on the PCB. And in general, yes, the main reason seller’s sell bare hard drive PCB’s—without a drive—is just for data recovery reasons like this. The process is quite simple; just remove the old PCB by removing a few screws, pull it out, install/screw in the new PCB and there you go. If all went well, the drive should come back to life when connected to a system.

The only caveat I see is perhaps there is something else happening on your hard drive itself and the issue is not the PCB at all. So replacing it would just give you a new PCB but you’d still be dealing with a drive with data issues.

So I would also recommend you contact Dell support and ask them if there is anything they can do to help you. Like perhaps providing you with older firmware directly to see if you can downgraded it on your own before investing in a $40+ PCB.

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  • Great, that sounds promising. I tried re-running the firmware update from a flash drive but since the BIOS can't detect the disk, it did nothing. I'm not sure the original firmware would be of much use now. It's always possible something else is wrong, but given this happened the moment I updated the firmware that'd be a huge coincidence. Unless there's some way I can put the old firmware back, I think I'll buy that PCB.
    – Vimm
    Mar 23, 2015 at 0:57

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