My Seagate HDD failed last week. It has 3 partitions: 1 Linux, 1 windows, and 1 for data.
I was working in Linux and suddenly when I was saving a text file the system complained saying the filesystem was read only. Then the whole Mate desktop disappeared and I had to restart.
When I restarted the HDD was not listed in the POST screen. Neither in the BIOS. I changed the connector to another SATA, changed the cable for a known working one, but it was dead.
After some time I mounted the HDD in a USB adapter box to make sure it was not the PSU. Amazingly it worked. I only had backup of the most important data, because I have too many files in the dying HDD and as of today I dont have enough backup storage. So I tried to backup the bulk of the remaining files in the data partition to a laptop, but after 4 minutes of copying the disk was gone again.
I turned the adapter on ond off several times to no avail.
After an hour or so I came back for my lost data again, and once more it turned on at the first try, but after 15 minutes it died in the same manner. And again once it dies, you turn it on and off several times but does not work.
Now it occurred to me that the HDD degrades with time, so I though it might be the temperature. I put it in the fridge for 20 minutes, then connected it again with an external fan, and I was able to recover 32 GB of my precious data. Just after that it died again.
On my 4th try, I repeated the fridge and fan technique but this time I placed a frozen bag on top of the metallic case of the HDD. Again I extracted several GBs of data.
I ran a S.M.A.R.T app and it says the HDD is at risk (too many moved sectors or something like that). This could indicate the disks are bad, but on the other hand the HDD seems to work better at 20ºC than at 35ºC, which could indicate the electronics in the controller are damaged.
Could this be possible? How should I proceed now: should I try a full clone while covered in ice? Should I try to repair it using software? Should I send it to a data recovery service (it will cost several hundreds, up to a thousand bucks).