PC can not recognize Seagate Internal Hard drive

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!

Also have a Seagate 7200.7 st3160023a , same thing not found in BIOS, Went to there web site and it dosent even reconize the modle #.

Disk spins some what
makes a light sound while spinning
Never gets warm
Cannot fell any torq of the drive on bootup

Ok, well in an effort to quell the seagate bashing and help the poster out. Have you tried the drive in another machine? Also, you can usually find the Seagate firmware update online, a lot of people have posted it up because Seagate doesn't like giving it out.

Oh and as a note to you Seagate haters: I have 3 recert seagate 1tb 7200.11 series, 1 brand new 7200.11 series, and now 2 WD 1TB caviar black editions in software raid 5. Guess why I have 1 brand new Seagate and not 3 Caviars? One died within 2 months. And I had the recertified drives about 6 months longer. I've never had a problem with any of the 10 Seagate drives I've owned over the past 3 years, all run strong to this day. I will agree their customer service sucks.

4.5 years, you might be out of warranty. I don't think Seagate has had their 5 year warranty program that long, and if it's an IDE drive, you almost certainly don't have a 7200.11 series, as the drives plagued the most were 1TB drives (which are SATA).

Firmware is the software which controls the physical aspects of the drive and allows it to interface with the rest of the computer. The problem is that a lot of the 7200.11 series Seagate drives had firmware issues which would cause the drive not to respond to commands from the motherboard.

It sounds like the controller for the drive crapped out. If the data on that drive is really really really important to you, you have basically 2 options:

option #1 - find an EXACT match to that drive (that works properly) and I mean down to the model number exactly, and attempt a controller swap, if that works, backup the data, throw out the drive. That is by no means a fix, just a way to prevent you from having to resort to option #2

option #2 - professional data recovery. NOT cheap. Expect $1000+ not cheap, but they should be able to get your stuff back. I've used Drivesavers before, and they were great to deal with.

That's a call that's up to you. In either event, learn and use ntbackup (it comes with windows) or some other automatic backup solution (there are lots), and implement it.

the frozen thing is definitely worth a try. overnight, in a new (no moisture or else..) zip lock bag is the best way. then try using it asap after taking it out of the freezer

I really dont know whats wrong with it. But it does seem to be turning, but not fast!

I went back and watched the video again and the guy said to also use a strong power supply just connected to that drive. I have a extra, so I might try that also.

I dont see any burnt spots any where on the circut board using a magnifing glass. Should the other side be inspected to?

a friend came out today and we pluged the drive in , we did this with the computer running! NOW the drives spins up to the right speed, but only for about 10 seconds and then shuts down.

My best guess is that its entirely possable for the board to be good and moter aswell but if its not going to read the firmware instructions from the disk , Its shot! Theres no way to get new firmware in it, by someone like me.

YOU GUYS ALL NEED LIVES!

Your drive may be a victim of the Seagate 7200.11 BSY bug.

Here are repair procedures for Seagate 7200.11 drives:
http://sites.google.com/site/seagatefix/
http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=128807

Tutorial with photos:
http://www.overclock.net/hard-driv [...] -pics.html

Pinout of Nokia CA-42 cable's Pop-port connector (use pins 6,7,8):
http://pinouts.ru/CellularPhones-N [...] nout.shtml

See the following technical bulletin:
http://www.expreview.com/img/topic [...] Update.pdf

Seagate were at one time offering free data recovery services to those customers whose drives were affected by the bug. This may still be the case.

After you have repaired your drive, you can apply the following firmware update.

Firmware Update for ST3500320AS, ST3500620AS, ST3500820AS, ST3640330AS, ST3640530AS, ST3750330AS, ST3750630AS, ST31000340AS [207951]:
http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/ [...] cId=207951

If the Windows based updater rejects your drive, then use the CD ISO version. The difference is that one version compares the drive's existing firmware specs against an update matrix file, whereas the other version just checks the drive's model and family.

Your Seagate may not be dead. I thought I had a drive die on me while using Win 2k. The drive stopped showing up in every way. I hooked it up to an XP machine and XP found tons of errors--sectors missing and the like--and fixed them.

Unfortunately now my drive only runs on XP and Win2k won't recognize it. (I run 2k presently due to a severe lack of RAM.) And my second Seagate died this morning in the exact same manner. Since both are in my pc, I cannot tell you atm what the serial is, but they are 250gb.

Sorry. I was looking for a quick fix, checking BIOS won't help, swapping the drive ports on the board won't help, as you've found. There seems to be something about Windows that doesn't like Seagate or vice versa. (Post Edit: ) After doing some research, it also seems that people running Asus boards have compat issues with Seagate drives as well. That may be mine... This is just a very generalized Google search for more info: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en [...] oEBU_QBFtf

You'll notice tons of incompatibility issues with their drives.

Still, I think they're a pretty good company for what they offer. I got both drives on sale for $50 several years ago and they're a cheap company for drives generally speaking. So I've gotten what I've paid for. And if you need a pos drive for data recovery on a possibly virused drive, or ....I dunno practice for your next baseball game or something, it does the job well enough. Just don't use it long term or plan for it to be a permanent part of you SCSI setup.

Also, I'm thinking the problem might be SATA technology in and of itself. When SATA 1 came out, you needed to RAID your set because of instability issues. It is entirely likely the issue still occurs but is more common to certain manufacturers. I know that a friend of mine was trying to figure out why his Dell Latitude Tablet wasn't utilizing the touch-screen features. It was because he was running XP and a) didn't have enough RAM to run the hardware plus XP and b) because the software came out prior to the Tablets and was incompatible in a lot of ways... It sucks but some manufactures don't seem to care, and Microsoft couldn't care less themselves unless you're buying leasing *cough* their software...

At any rate, on the your return, did you go through their RMA department online? That may sound like a stupid question, but you have a valid return--if you have all the documentation and receipts. Here's Seagate's contact info: http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/about/contact_us/ Personally I'm calling Asus since my board is still under warranty.

Good luck!

I don't think this is an issue with Windows at all. He stated that the drive does not come up in bios. A hard reset would have corrected any disk or embedded controller confusion.

I have a Seagate 160gb SATA drive exhibiting the same issue, which is what brought me to this page. I tried a direct connection to the SATA controller, and have also stuck it in a USB dock for SATA drives. The drive is not recognized either way.
Since the drive doesn't even seem to exhibit the initialization seek pattern (to read the frimware off of the platter), I can only assume the embedded controller has failed.

You might want to find an exact copy of the drive (maybe ebay?) and swap out the circuit boards on the bottom of the drive. I've brought drives back that way long enough to get my data off of them.

Good luck!

warranty

This topic has been closed by Mousemonkey