Topic: HDD Fail?

[Polski]

Thought I might post here and avoid any possible opinionated nonsense from the Atomic forums Any guidance is appreciated.

I'm not really sure what happened. As per usual I made sure my computer was turned off at the wall before going to work. I came back this afternoon and suddenly one of my Seagate drives would not detect at all, and the other one (now that I'm in windows again and can load Disk Management) shows up as unreadable. The one I'm working from is my Western Digital - the one that I would have thought was more likely to fail since it runs twice as hot as the Seagates.

Now I assume the failure has nothing to do with brand, even though both Seagates are currently out. The only thing I can imagine could have caused this is from my computer possibly being in suspend S3 mode (suspend to RAM), having some sort of horrid link to the HDD in terms of power supply and corrupted something.

Other than that, I'm at a complete loss as to how I turn my computer on and it's suddenly decided it doesn't want to recognise my 500GB at all, recognise my 1TB but not allow me to access it, and corrupt/lose my NTLDR file as I got a "missing" message, hence me having to reinstall XP again.


SO, what I'm trying now are things like BIOS updates, trying to get my computer to a point where I can install a damn program again, such as the SeaTools, and also running a CHKDSK /F on my WD - even though that does nothing for the drives my MB won't even detect/give access to.

[Arghdee]

Obviously, you've tried changing the ports the drives are connected to, to rule out a possible controller failure?

Unplug the WD drive and plug in one of the others. See if the fault follows the drive.

Before you arse around too much installing BIOS updates and such.. find the problem first and fix it, rather than trying to fix it with a shotgun approach. Although, if worst comes to worst, a shotgun will fix it once and for all.

[Polski]

Haha, oh yeah I should have mentioned that. Sorry I was so tired at that stage >_< a shotgun might have helped.

Yes I've tried changing the ports. No matter what combination, the 500GB Seagate completely stops the others from even registering. The 200GB WD and the 1TB Seagate work okay together, but the 1TB Seagate shows up as "Dynamic Unreadable" in the Disk Manager.

But honestly, that's why I posted on here; to see if anyone might have some insight into what caused it. Without knowing what caused it, I can't find the problem. I have nothing to test with, so it's not like each individual component can be tested.

I'm thinking a possibility might be the motherboard SATA controller? Anyone feel free to call that suggestion silly, but it might explain why it's having trouble with both Seagates, and when I put one in it stops the others from even recognising.

[Arghdee]

Substitution is going to be probably the best way of figuring this one out.

Any possibility of trying the Seagate drives in another machine?

If there's only one drive controller on the mobo, I'd be thinking it's not likely to be that at fault. after all, it works OK with the WD drive.

Obviously you've also substituted cables?

Otherwise, at this point, given the information you've provided, the only other thing I can think of is that the drives both happened to shit themselves when you powered the machine back on. Unlikely, but stranger things have happened.

Again, substitution and testing are going to be your friends in getting this resolved. Hope you had backups of the data on those drives.

[Polski]

Thanks Arghdee,

I haven't bothered to try changing over the cables... I have changed them around and with any combination the WD still works.

I actually just found that it suddenly just booted with the 500GB plugged in. CPUID Hardware Monitor doesn't even register that anything is there.

I'm going to do a more thorough testing of the combinations now, and I don't know... do some testing using the SMART technology and some applications I have found.

The shops should open in a couple of hours (lazy bastiges, don't open until 12!), so I'll just take my whole computer down there and see if I can get some quick tests of the individual units and find the root of the problem.

[Certified Wise]

Have you tried the drives in another machine?

[Polski]

No, I don't have a second machine... so I'm about to go down to the shops and get them tested properly. I'll let you all know once I get back.

Harddrive failure isn't fun =( I think I've learned my lesson and am probably going to use monitoring tools and backups more frequently now. If I can get the 1TB working again, most of my personal documents from a year ago are backed up there, along with some software.

[Polski]

Okay, proper problem diagnosis time! This should really help I hope

The tech guy didn't help at all... nothing against him! He just wasn't able to tell me anything I didn't already know xD

I tested the SATA ports. It has an odd configuration. It has 4 IDE Channels in the BIOS. These channels comprise of:

• Port 0) IDE Channel 0 Master
• Port 1) IDE Channel 1 Master
• Port 2) IDE Channel 0 Slave
• Port 3) IDE Channel 1 Slave
• Port 4) IDE Channel 2 Master
• Port 5) IDE Channel 3 Master
• IDE Channel 4 Master (for PATA Drive Port 0)
• IDE Channel 4 Slave (for PATA Drive Port 0)

By plugging the 3 SATA drives into ports 0,1 and 4, I am able to boot the entire computer with all 4 drives connected.

So... once in the computer what I see is:

• Port 0) 200GB - Reads okay, my OS runs off this and am able to access my storage partition - Linux partition is unreadable, but am also unable to boot linux from it >_< i'll work on that later (linux newbie)
• Port 1) 500GB - Doesn't detect in BIOS, all I see is a space where it should be
• Port 4) 1TB - Disk Management indicates disk is Dynamic, but "Unreadable" or "Offline"
• The PATA drive connected via IDE on Channel 4 is fine, and contains a lot of my old files. Nice old Seagate drive Lasted me a good 6 odd years now I think

I don't have anymore information on the 500GB HDD. I know it is Seagate, but the Western Digital Data LifeGuard Diagnostics program is known to diagnose all drives nicely. So with the 1TB, it passes the "Quick Test" (SMART drive quick self-test). Currently I am running the Extended Test(Full Media Scan to detect bad sectors), which will take about an hour considering it has a terabyte to chomp through.

Hopefully that should be enough for you guys and any other experts to give some good advice on the situation Thanks again for all your help guys.

[Arghdee]

You know what I did to prevent having to troubleshoot PC issues?

Bought a MacBook Pro for myself and a MacBook for my wife. My PC is sitting in the spare room gathering dust.

Good luck with your issue.

[Polski]

Heh yeah, no doubt any well built laptop with a decent OS will help. The modular nature of PCs appeals to me though I'm simply treating this as a learning experience, so whilst it sounds like a horrid pain, I'm actually enjoying it because I get a chance to learn some more cool tech stuff!

So question is, does anyone have any good advice for recovering data from HDDs? I understand it would void the warranty, but I somehow doubt they would happily transfer the data over to the new drive... would they?

[JJJ]

A replacement drive will be an empty refurb if you do go down the RMA route.

All is not lost yet - it'd be useful to try to run it in another machine / enclosure.

[Certified Wise]

Yeah, give another machine a go, you just may be surprised.

[Polski]

Yeah, sorry I should have been more clear in my other post... I took it to the shops and they tested it in another computer with a external port. Exactly the same - 500GB is not detected and 1TB is unreadable.

[zebra]

We had dual 500GB and dual 750GB Seagate 7200.11 units recently fail due to the fairly well documented fw bug that occurs inter-controller. It was a known, repeatable and verifiable issue on many 10's of thousands of the units shipped.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seagate_Barracuda

You might want to look into it. It can be fixed. This doesn't necessitate data loss, and moreover, can be recovered from if you RMA with seagate direct and point them in the right direction.

http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board/message?board.id=ata_drives&thread.id=3283

Disks affected by the last bug will not be detected in the Computer BIOS after a reboot. Numerous users have complained of this and are discussing it in a public forum [6] when discussions in the Seagate forums [7] were subjected to heavy moderation and subsequently closed. The symptom of the problem is that the Computer BIOS will no longer detect the hard disk after a reboot, and upon connecting to the hard disk with a Serial TTL board, this error code will be seen "LED:000000CC FAddr:0024A051". Faulty firmware triggers this 'failure', and the hard disk 'disappearances' seem to be happening in the month of November, December 2008 and 2009 and still going on as reported in the forums. Seagate Freeagent external drives also utilize 7200.11 harddisks with SDxx firmware and people have reported failures of theses drives as well. The LED remains permanently on even after a USB disconnect and the drive is no longer detected. Seagate though says they are unaffected, so only opening of the case reveals the truth. Two companies have claimed to be able to resolve this problem using their solution, namely Ace Laboratory PC3000-UDMA (version 4.13) [8] and Salvation Data HD Doctor for Seagate (version 3.0) [9].

RMA direct to seagate. Tell them you suspect firmware failure a-la 7200.11 controller-of-death bug. Tell them the data is critical.

We've seen them turn a failed controller unit back to us in 3 days flat...

z

[Polski]

!!!

Thank you! I love you Zebra man!