What caused my drive to die?
November 11, 2009 4:22 PM Subscribe
What happened that suddenly caused my harddrive to not be recognized by BIOS?
I fired up my computer this evening to discover that none of the SATA devices were being recognized during POST/in BIOS. This included 1 LG DVD writer, 1 Seagate 1TB drive, and 1 Seagate 500gb drive.
[After panicing] I took out all 3 devices and tried them individually in two different computers. It appears that both the 1TB drive and the DVD writer are detected by BIOS on their own, and the 500gb drive is not. When the 500gb drive is coupled with either component, nothing is detected.
No strange noises are being made by this harddrive. It does sound like it's spinning up, but I can't be 100% sure. The drive was functioning fine when I was using it last night, and nothing out of the ordinary happened during the shut down procedure.
I'm running Windows 7 Pro x64, on ~2 month old hardware. Motherboard is a Gigabyte EP45-UD3P. This 500gb drive (model ST3500320AS) however, is older. I'm currently looking for the receipt to determine exactly how old it is.
Do I have any hope of prying data off this drive? I don't own a SATA enclosure for 3.5" drives, but I can probably borrow one from a co-worker tomorrow (or buy one). Since having this drive plugged in seems to cause every other SATA device to stop working, I can't use a live cd to run testdisk or similar software.
More importantly, did this drive die on it's own, or could there be something else going on? How can I test for such a possibility?
(I'll mention that I do have backups of important files, so this shouldn't be a big issue.. But who wants to download 20gb of games off Steam again?)
I fired up my computer this evening to discover that none of the SATA devices were being recognized during POST/in BIOS. This included 1 LG DVD writer, 1 Seagate 1TB drive, and 1 Seagate 500gb drive.
[After panicing] I took out all 3 devices and tried them individually in two different computers. It appears that both the 1TB drive and the DVD writer are detected by BIOS on their own, and the 500gb drive is not. When the 500gb drive is coupled with either component, nothing is detected.
No strange noises are being made by this harddrive. It does sound like it's spinning up, but I can't be 100% sure. The drive was functioning fine when I was using it last night, and nothing out of the ordinary happened during the shut down procedure.
I'm running Windows 7 Pro x64, on ~2 month old hardware. Motherboard is a Gigabyte EP45-UD3P. This 500gb drive (model ST3500320AS) however, is older. I'm currently looking for the receipt to determine exactly how old it is.
Do I have any hope of prying data off this drive? I don't own a SATA enclosure for 3.5" drives, but I can probably borrow one from a co-worker tomorrow (or buy one). Since having this drive plugged in seems to cause every other SATA device to stop working, I can't use a live cd to run testdisk or similar software.
More importantly, did this drive die on it's own, or could there be something else going on? How can I test for such a possibility?
(I'll mention that I do have backups of important files, so this shouldn't be a big issue.. But who wants to download 20gb of games off Steam again?)
Response by poster: Apparently I'm inept at searching. Thank you
This serial and model number of this drive turns up a new firmware version, so hopefully that's good news
posted by comradestu at 4:47 PM on November 11, 2009
This serial and model number of this drive turns up a new firmware version, so hopefully that's good news
posted by comradestu at 4:47 PM on November 11, 2009
« Older I hate my job and I want out. How? | Its Alive! Its Alive? (Uses for sad lonely PDA's... Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.
The 500gb drive was purchased just over a year ago: Oct 29 2008
posted by comradestu at 4:25 PM on November 11, 2009