Seagate Rosewood Recovery: In-Depth Process
A 105-minute walkthrough of a Seagate Rosewood 1TB clicking drive recovery, covering preamp matching, donor selection by manufacturing date code, and the physical inspection that determines whether a head swap can proceed.
Why Rosewood Drives Are Everywhere
Seagate Rosewood 1TB and 2TB drives ended up in a huge number of external enclosures, laptops, and consumer backup products during the late 2010s. They are the most common drive family in data recovery. The typical failure mode is clicking: the read/write heads are mechanically damaged and strike the platter or parking ramp on each seek attempt.
The standard fix is a head swap from a compatible donor drive. The complication with Rosewood is that the preamp (preamplifier) on the head stack assembly must match the patient drive's PCB. If it does not match, the drive will not read data, and in some cases the mismatched heads produce errors that corrupt recovery attempts.
Preamp Matching by Date Code
Unlike older Seagate F3 drives where the preamp type could be read from the ROM via terminal commands, Rosewood drives do not expose this information. Technicians use the manufacturing date code printed on the drive label (YY/MM format) to estimate which preamp was installed. Drives manufactured around 2016 tend to have C202 preamps; those from 2018 onward are more likely to have 8202 preamps. The 8202 is far more common and easier to source as a donor.
This is statistical, not guaranteed. Seagate occasionally mixed preamp types within the same manufacturing window. When the first donor does not work, technicians try another. This is why professional recovery shops maintain large inventories of Rosewood donor drives organized by date code and known preamp type.
Physical Inspection Before the Swap
The video covers a rule that data recovery technicians follow with clicking drives: do not power it on to confirm the clicking. Every power cycle with damaged heads risks more platter damage. Open the drive first in a clean environment and inspect.
In this case, the Rosewood patient drive had platter shaving visible on inspection, meaning the heads had already deposited debris on the platter surface. That required clean bench cleaning before any head swap could proceed. If the technician had installed fresh donor heads onto a contaminated platter, those new heads would have been destroyed on the first spin.
Rosewood Drive Clicking?
Stop powering it on. We keep Rosewood donor drives in stock, organized by preamp type, and handle the head swap on our Austin clean bench. Free evaluation, no charge if we cannot recover data.