Went to boot up my main PC today and its no longer recognising the primary HDD. Doesnt show in the BIOS at all.
The other drive works fine. Not fiddled with anything since it last worked on friday afternoon. I checked power and data cables and all ok. Its a SATA
drive.
I think its the end of the drive.... 
I have the important stuff backed up. Would be nice to get the other stuff off it though....seems to have no
power though.
Swapping the HDD cables over and the main HDD still doesnt show and the other is fine.
[Edited on 27/9/10 by flak monkey]
Been there - done that and got the Tee Shirt - willing to bet it's a Seagate Drive. 
You have my sympathy.
I now duplicate my drives and swap them monthly so I don't have to rebuild my C drive and reinstall everything ever again - unless of course I
change my motherboard and other essential hardware.
quote:
willing to bet it's a Seagate Drive.
Yep, its a seagate 500Gb barracuda
I keep a second drive installed as a back up drive and back up the important stuff every now and again....
if you can get the same hard drive model and revision, you might be able to swap the pcb and copy the files.
if you are willing to risk it of distroying a new hd
quote:
Originally posted by l0rd
if you can get the same hard drive model and revision, you might be able to swap the pcb and copy the files.
if you are willing to risk it of distroying a new hd
I may try getting hold of a secondhand working drive. The drive is at least 3 years old so I wont be able to get a new one.
The drive recovery company I dealt with when my first seagate drive failed told me that Seagates <1Tb have a known fault that if the drive motor
starts getting noisy it is soon to fail and that once that happens nobody can recover the data - ever.
A series of 1Tb have a firmware problem that when it happens can be reflashed and the drive recovered although it is certain to happen again -
happened to me.
Of course Seagate take no responsibility for this although they will replace it if within warranty but that doesn't help you recover any data
from your drive - and if you pay almost 3X the value of the disc to have the firmware re-flashed then they claim there is nothing wrong with the disc
so charge you for the cost of the warranty claim.
From the above you can see I am no fan of Seagate and will never have another of their drives in a computer of mine.
ps - the data recovery firm claim that Western Digital are the drives that give the least trouble - I have switched to them and although I work my
drives hard (intensive MS Access and GIS user) have not yet had a problem with them.
[Edited on 28/9/10 by Ivan]
i just had a seagate drive go at the weekend, go to the seagate website, you may find it's still in warranty (i think it's 5 years?). Just
get the serial number and part number off the back of the drive and enter them into the page.
Also download the seatools utility to see what it says
quote:
Originally posted by flak monkey
quote:
Originally posted by l0rd
if you can get the same hard drive model and revision, you might be able to swap the pcb and copy the files.
if you are willing to risk it of distroying a new hd
Good idea
I have a feeling my 2 drives are actually identical.
So I may well get the new drive installed and then copy all the data off the old working drive then swap the bits over to get the data of the one
thats NFG.
For the sake of a couple of minutes it's well worth speaking to Seagate's support staff. I had a 500GB drive fail on me due to the firmware
on the PCB having a known fault (boot up counter would get stuck at 322 or something like that).
Within 24 hours my drive was collected by TNT and sent to Seagate's data recovery company (i365) in Holland. I had my drive back within 5 days
along with the new firmware on the PCB.
I think my drive was also 3 years old.
quote:
Originally posted by Scott W
For the sake of a couple of minutes it's well worth speaking to Seagate's support staff. I had a 500GB drive fail on me due to the firmware on the PCB having a known fault (boot up counter would get stuck at 322 or something like that).
Within 24 hours my drive was collected by TNT and sent to Seagate's data recovery company (i365) in Holland. I had my drive back within 5 days along with the new firmware on the PCB.
I think my drive was also 3 years old.
Seems like this is a common/well known fault with the 7200.11 seagate drives and is caused by a firmware issue.
Seagate will fix the drives with the known fault.
As my other drive is exactly the same I will update the firmware on that tonight!