Comments on: Diagnosing a faulty hard drive

Question: Diagnosing a faulty hard drive

ArmyOfKittens — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 01:34:25 -0800

My PC is no longer recognising one of my SATA hard drives.

This morning when I turned on my PC it did not recognise any of the SATA devices - OS HD (200gb Seagate), storage HD (500gb Seagate), and DVD writer (a cheapo Samsung job). After a bit of messing about I discovered that I can boot fine with just the OS HD and the DVD plugged in, but plugging in the storage HD - whether it's the only SATA device plugged in or in any combination with the others - causes the system to stop seeing any SATA devices (and once caused it to power off as soon as it powered on).

I have nothing on the PATA port. My motherboard is a Gigabyte P31-DS3L, my PSU is a Corsair VX450, and I run Windows XP SP2. The 200gb (working) drive is about three years old, the 500gb (broken) one is a little less than a year old. The PC has not been moved recently. I've tried them all on different SATA cables and off different sockets (although the mobo only has four) and with different power cables off the PSU. I've reset the bios to "failsafe defaults". Running Windows on the working drive seems as stable as usual.

Last night I left the PC downloading, set to hibernate when it had finished getting the file.

I'm assuming the drive has just flat-out died at this point, but before I RMA I'd love some ideas to get it working again, even just for long enough to rescue some data (the data on the drive isn't important enough to actually spend money on a retrieval service, but there are some photos and documents and things it would be nice to rescue; and yes, I've learned my lesson about backing files up now!).

By: Blazecock Pileon

Blazecock Pileon — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 03:05:54 -0800

Hard drive freezer trick

By: gjc

gjc — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 05:51:42 -0800

I doubt the freezer trick would work in this case, that's usually for mechanical failures. This is an electronic failure. Probably shot. You could try getting an identical drive and swapping the circuit boards, that has worked for me a few times when I had a hard drive that's mechanically sound but electronically shot.

By: kdar

kdar — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 06:18:20 -0800

I think you've pretty much exhausted all of your options for diagnostics, unless you're interested in trying the affected drive in another machine. Looks like it's time to RMA + swap.

By: Simon Barclay

Simon Barclay — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 06:57:09 -0800

Your 500 GB Seagate is probably part of a batch with a known firmware problem. If that's the case, your data is still there, but you need to flash your firmware. See here to determine if your drive is potentially affected, and how to act.

I've heard that Seagate is worried about their image, so they may pay to retrieve your data - don't just send it in as any normal RMA without calling them first and complaining. Push to get them to retrieve your data.

Also, do some Google searching (for example), as some people have had success flashing their drive even after it bricked. Normally, you would have downloaded an ISO file to burn onto CD, boot from the CD, and flash your drive. Maybe you can still do that, even with the bricked drive?

By: ArmyOfKittens

ArmyOfKittens — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 08:11:57 -0800

Simon, that looks right on the money. Pootling around the forum indicates that my drive has the classic symptoms of brickitude caused by that firmware fault. I'll look into flashing the thing before I succumb to the whole "please don't look at my photos and embarrassing archived diary entries from when I was seventeen" data retrieval service.

Thanks :)

By: Simon Barclay

Simon Barclay — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 13:51:24 -0800

Please let me know how it works out.

By: ArmyOfKittens

ArmyOfKittens — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 04:04:19 -0800

Flashing didn't work, unfortunately, but it seemed like a long shot anyway. I have a ticket raised with Seagate right now, to start the whole repair and recovery process. So it's looking good for me and all my embarrassing old photographs :)

By: ArmyOfKittens

ArmyOfKittens — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 02:42:37 -0800

Further update: Seagate have confirmed to me that *if* the drive died because of this formware issue, they can force-flash it with the new firmware and ship it back to me, good as new. If it's another issue, they'll replace the drive; in which case I'll lose my data, but I can't afford hundreds of pounds for a data recovery service right now. Or ever, really.

So it seems to be working out as well as could be hoped :)

By: Simon Barclay

Simon Barclay — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 06:21:58 -0800

Good luck with your data!

By: ArmyOfKittens

ArmyOfKittens — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 12:13:10 -0800

The automail reminded me to come back to this thread, so here I am, confirming that I got the hard drive back from Seagate, data intact, firmware upgraded, and working perfectly. :)

By: Simon Barclay

Simon Barclay — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 16:43:35 -0800

Wow, that was pretty fast. Congratulations!