3TB Seagate HDD w/ multiple partitions: How to diagnose and fix?

[IRingTwyce]

I have a 3TB Seagate Barracuda drive that is divided into multiple partitions on a system with a SSD boot drive. There are (I think) 7 partitions. The drive is less than 3 years old and is very lightly used. The system is shut down nightly. After I installed Bitdefender I began having problems. BD botched an update and wouldn't work properly with my system (turns out to be an ongoing issue with ASUS boards) so I uninstalled it.

After removing Bitdefender, my Seagate drive no longer worked properly. Two (or maybe three) partitions were no longer recognized by the system. One of the partitions affected contained all programs that weren't stored on the SSD. The remaining partitions were available and accessible, but only for the amount of time that the system spent trying to access the missing partitions. So, after 2-5 minutes Windows would disconnect the entire drive and no longer recognize it.

I did some hardware troubleshooting, switching SATA cables and posts. So I was able to eliminate the motherboard and cables from the equation. All that remains is the drive itself. I was able to save the data in the other partitions through multiple reboots and transferring data while the system looked for the missing partitions.

My question at this point is: How can I diagnose and/or repair this drive? Is it a hardware issue with the drive itself or could it be data-related? Windows won't recognize it long enough for a re-format, and even if it did the missing partitions wouldn't be wiped. Windows would give up after not being able to recognize the bad partitions and disconnect the entire drive like it has been doing.

System specs:
Win7 Home Premium
ASUS Sabertooth Z77
Intel i7-4770k
16 GB G.Skill TridentX memory
128 GB Vertex4 SSD boot drive
3TB Seagate 7200 rpm data drive
G-Force GTX 780

 

[BadAsAl]

Run Seatools for DOS from a CD or a USB drive. Run the short tests first (there are 2 of them). If they pass run the long test. Any failures mean the drive itself is failing and you need to get what you can off it and get a new one.
If it passes these tests then you can be reasonably assured the hardware is okay and the next step I would be trying is booting to a Linux Live CD or USB and seeing what you can see on the drive.

 

[IRingTwyce]

How will this work when the drive will not show in Windows or in the BIOS? That's what I'm getting at with my question.

 

[Someone Somewhere]

You didn't say anything about it not showing up in the BIOS.

If it doesn't show up in the BIOS, this isn't a partitioning issue. Either the drive is dead, it's not connected right, or your BIOS is set wrong. Try resetting the BIOS to defaults.

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there IRingTwyce,

You've mentioned swapping SATA cables but not the power ones. You can use a different power cable as well. You can even attach the drive to a different system and see if it recognized by BIOS.
In case it is not, I would agree with Someone Somewhere and say that the drive is most probably dead.

D_Know_WD

 

[IRingTwyce]

I swapped power cables as well as SATA cables and posts. It's definitely not a hardware issue outside the drive.

I screwed around with it last night. Got it to show the drive in the BIOS. Then I would re-boot straight into the Seatools DOS. Seatools did not recognize any drives.

During the boot into Seatools when it's running the setup I could see several lines of text that ended with "partition to large" just before it displayed the GUI. When exiting Seatools it gives the instructions for accessing the bootlog, but no boot log exists on my system.

I wasn't able to find any information online about this boot issue either.

So, still stuck.