PC can not recognize Seagate Internal Hard drive

For some reason my Seagate hard drive is no longer being recognized by my pc. It is not in MY COMPUTER, Bios, or disk manager. I have no idea what happened I have not been inside to computer at all and it was working just fine a day or so ago. I checked seagates website and my model number is not listed under the firmware updates, so I have no idea what happened.

There is no clicking, all cables are fine, I tried different sata ports including power and still nothing.

I pulled the hard drive and hooked it up to 2 different transfer kits and neither worked. I hooked it up to a usb data transfer kit and it powers on but will not show in Device manager, disk Manager or My computer. There is no odd noises or excessive heat. Then I plugged it into my hard drive enclosure and that to did not work.

After I pulled the hard drive I noticed the following message in device manager with a yellow exclamation mark.

"a2rnr08h ide controller"

I tried to update the driver and received a message stating that drivers could not be found, I put the Mobo disks in and still nothing.


So after doing some research I found that this is a common problem with these drives and Seagate has an update for it. While I went and downloaded the ISO update and booted into it, but I got the following message while trying to install the new firmware

"scanning for controllers
scanning for devices
scanning for devices on Generic PCI ATA

Found 0 Devices

Scanning for devices on Generic PCI ATA
Found 1 Device
Scan complete, 2 controllers and 1 device detected

****************
Exit with Code 2

****************
Error: Specific Model Not found.. Expected"



I have no clue why it cant find the exact model because I triple checked the model before trying this and I unhooked my primary Western Digital drive while doing this, so I dont know why it cant find it?

Although the interesting thing is that on the box it has the model number as ST3500641AS-RK, but on the hard drive itself the model number is ST3500320AS and that is the number I searched and found out that this is a common problem. The serial numbers are the same.

So at this point I have no idea what else to try and I will tell you this I will NEVER again buy a single Seagate product..............when I was purchasing this I had a bad feeling about it and I STILL put the WD drive down and got this POS instead

Its 2 months old and Circuit City is out of business I have been waiting days for a response from Seagate.

Well not only do their drives suck but their customer service is just as bad. So far 4 emails and 4 calls and yet NOTHING.

Congrats on that, nice big fast drive..... if it runs more than 2 months I would consider you extremely fortunate.

I second the motion of Seagates are pieces of junk from china or where ever.
As for your problem. I would keep pounding on their support. If nothing else. Replace the cable.

If you have a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 This may be your problem

Urgent Firmware Update Required For Some Seagate Hard Drive Models

Please refer to:http://www.ximeta.com/web/

If it is the problem I am pretty sure they will fix it for free.

Cheers

If it is a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11, read the article fully. If your drive fits the criteria listed in the article you will not be able to fix it, it has to be returned to Seagate.
In the article you will find:
"If you have already experienced a problem and have a drive exhibiting this failure, please contact your appropriate Seagate representative for support in recovering your data - Seagate will be providing data recovery services at no charge to users impacted by this problem."

Well guys Seagate offer 5 years warranty. But before returning any Drive to Seagate check out this link: http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index. [...] 4090aRCRD.
If you still can't solve the problem and want to return the drive make sure that you follow their shipping requirements. They have replaced 2 of my drives including a Maxtor that Seagate took over. Customer Service isn't flash but at least they stand by their word.

Seriously, THIS IS NOT A PROBLEM WITH THE DRIVE. It is a problem with Windows. I'm having the same trouble getting mine to work in Vista, but it works (and has worked for almost a year now) like a dream in Ubuntu. Therefore, you can't really blame Seagate.

Reading up on SATA drives, you'll find that most drives are automatically recognized by the OS. All you have to do is plug it in and it shows up in the BIOS. However, Vista fails to recognize dozens of commonly used hds from several reputable manufacturers. What's worse is that I've found no successful way of adding to Vista's driver list, meaning what you see is what you get it. Look around and I'm sure you'll find people who have your drive working like a dream in XP. That is the case with mine, at least.

Also, consider downloading an Ubuntu Live CD. It only takes around an hour to download and mount the image and then you can run the os right off the cd. Then you can see if you see and save stuff to the drive. Willing to bet it works great with a stable linux distro.

I still say it's the firmware issue and not a problem with the harddrive. You say that Seagate knows how to fix the issue, and to be honest, I don't think they do. The way they seem to fix things is by removing the problems in their own forums. People started talking about this same problem in their forums and the moderators took the 19 page thread down to 3 overnight. All of the users with the problem are now posting here: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.ph [...] 92&st=1140

Without question, Seagate has completely failed to offer a solution, offering no new drives, no free data retrieval, and never getting back to customers' service requests, particularly when they guarantee results within 24 hours.

That being said, you are an idiot to think that only computer geeks use Linux. Linux is a POWERFUL OS and an amazing resource, which is why I mentioned it in the first place. Also, the use of switchable opensource drivers means that somebody, somewhere has fixed your problem and can easily share the fix he developed with the rest of the people having trouble. Why do you think companies like Dell, HP, Sun, Novell, and IBM/Lenovo, and Red Hat all have their own commercial Linux Distributions? The NY Times reported last year there are over 10 million users of the Ubuntu distribution alone, and that number is rising ever since Dell started offering it preinstalled on their computers, Michael Dell being a sole Linux user.

I find it particularly interesting that you chose to voice your opinions about this IN A COMPUTER HARDWARE FORUM where...guess what: the people helping you just might be into computers...

Oh and btw, this is going to be a stupid answer, but it may fix someone's problems, so I'll go ahead and post.

Osx and Linux will both recognize and mount hd's that are disabled in the bios; WINDOWS DOES NOT.

MAKE SURE YOU HAVE THE HARD DRIVE ENABLED/ACTIVE IN THE BIOS/BOOT OPTIONS!