I Think It's Dead...

[ironmaningellis]

Hello everyone (thanks in advance for reading my thread)

I have a Seagate ST3500320as (500 gb SATA) hard drive on my system, and I think it's just gone. Let me give a little history...

The drive is only 5 months old, it had Windows Vista 64-bit installed on it. No problems, it was fantastic.

I turned the computer off for the night and when I turned it back on in the morning, it tried to boot up and couldn't locate a boot sector (loose terminology please I'm not that great with specific words) so it wanted to restart. I opened up the bios configuration and checked the boot preference (I have 3 hard drives total in my system: two 80 gbs that are old and slower and I use for storage nowadays and the new one which was my primary) and the ST3500... was no longer listed.

I gave a big and looked into it...reconnected all the cables, tried a different SATA cable, different power conenctors, different port, etc. Basically everything I can do physically with cables that don't involve replacing anything. I also tried unplugging all the fans and all the other drives and still nothing.

The drive DOES spin up, so I know it's getting power. The bios can't recognize it all of a sudden and I can't get into it. After some online research I guess a lot of people have had problems with this model pooping out on them. Does anyone have any suggestions I haven't tried? I can send it back for a replacement, but we all know what a pain that is plus I don't have a backup (now I'm regretting not using RAID1).

Thanks again for taking the time to read this thread, sorry it was so long, and I do appreciate it in this busy time of the year. Happy holidays everyone! Please feel free to ask any other questions, I'd be happy to try to answer.

Hard drive spec:
500 gb
SATA 3 gb/s
32 mb cache

System:
GIGABYTE GA-EP35-DS3L Mobo
Intel Q6600 Quad Core
Drives:
500 gb ST3500320as
80 gb Seagate SATA 1.5 gb/s(an older model from about 4 years ago, sorry I don't have the model name)
80 gb WD ATA (again, older)

(Edit: If you're curious to any specs on the mobo here is a link from newegg, anything not specified there I can rummage around in the manual for you)

 

[kamkal]

your guess is probably correct, the drive's dead jim

as for getting the data off the drive, you would have to take it to a specialized drive recovery place such as http://www.drivesavers.com/ or if there is a local store close to you

these places usually charge an arm and a leg to ATTEMPT to get the data off the drive, so it is really a matter of how much the data is worth to you


the only other thing you could try is to put the drive into an external enclosure and see if it is picked up via USB port, i've had an optical drive crap out in the bios detection process on 4 comps but worked when i stuck it in an enclosure
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817173048

you can also try it on another computer if you have one available

 

[ironmaningellis]

Hmm that might be worth a try. Thanks for the suggestion, I didn't try putting it in another computer I think I'll try that. As for the enclosure, it's pretty cheap so if I put off getting an RMA from seagate I might try that after the holidays Thanks for the reply!

 

[bobbknight]

Yep it's dead and your gona have to pay to get the data off the drive.
Really the RMA process with Seagate is not bad at all.
( Said in the Steve Balmer Developers Emphatic Style ) Back up, back up, back up, back up.

 

[kamkal]

np

 

[Guest]

Incorrect. The drive is NOT dead. The firmware on the drive has locked it in a BUSY state. You need to connect to the drive's using a serial transmitter to reset the BUSY state. This is definitely a Seagate firmware defect they should fess up to. But I had the exact same problem and was able to restore the drive to 100% working order with all data within 3 minutes. Google "HD Doctor for Seagate" or PM me if you still have the drive.