I'm extremely pissed off, my few day old new Samsung F1 1TB hdd has decided to kill itself just after I moved everything over. I was in the process of backing it all up onto the old drives after formating them, I've coppied my graphics work and photos across but EVERYTHING else is gone. All of my music, video, documents, etc is now lost. I've never had a HDD fail on me, so much for Samsung, always bought Seagate until now I'm going to try a recovery on the old drives but I did a permanent\secure format for some stupid reason so that probably wont work. Is the board\one of the chips on the HDD dead or something?, is it possible to swap it with one from a working drive?
I would firstly remove the disk from the PC, you don't want a mishap with the data that's on it. Depends on what you call a secure format, I would run GetDataBack from Runtime soft remember to use the right one, FAT32 or NTFS, theres nothing like having it scan the disk for an hour only to tell you it cant find an OS. As for replacing the controller board, I have swapped them in the past, and I have an old IBM Desk(death)star 75GXP that is in working order for when some unsuspecting person calls me up to fix *THAT* little debacle. I would call Samsung up and explain the situation, they may well send a working drive out to you so you can transfer the data, rather than a normal RMA where you send them the disk first. Its worth a shot, if not there are less reputable routes you can investigate.
As Cabe said sometimes they can send you a drive out first to try and recover your data. WD do exactly this, its called an Advance(d? Maybe) RMA. And I definitely agree that GetDataBack is a good route, its saved my ass a few times.
Thanks for the reply's Swapping the board was the best solution I could see as the data *should* be intact, but I presumed Samsung might not be that helpful in terms of aiding me in a board swap. After a bit of Google'ing it looks like these drives are prone to this so they may be more helpful than I thought, it's worth a shot. I've calmed down a bit now, but i'm still a bit peed off Data loss is the digital equivalent of a kick in the balls...
