Help me diagnose a hard drive problem

[Jay10826]

This particular hdd recently stopped working, all my others work fine.

Its a Seagate barracuda 7200.11 1TB ST31000340AS SATA.

The drive spins up fine and sounds normal, but its not detected by the computer. When I turn on the PC, the POST takes a lot longer than normal when this hdd is connected (regardless of whether other hard drives are connected or not). It's not shown in the BIOS, setup, or windows. Briefly tried it on another PC, same thing.

Any ideas what the problem is? Could it be fixed by replacing the board from the same model hdd?

Thats a lot for any help!

 

[Jay10826]

I got the drive fixed for $60 by a guy on ebay...its working and I got my data back.

 

[goombawaho]

Glad to hear that. But..... if you trust your hard drive and your data to "some guy on ebay" you could have just as easily ended up with identity theft and/or a torched hard drive instead of the happy result you got.

That's why we would only suggest PROFESSIONAL data recovery. Think about it. Some dude has your hard drive which may contain tax returns, compromising photos of yourself or your significant other, etc. I wouldn't trust my data to somebody off Craig's List or Ebay.

 

[Jay10826]

well, this guy had a lot of good feedback from previous customers...so i trusted him

 

[MesaMarshall]

Glad to hear your drive is better; I would watch your credit report more closely now, just to be safe.



-Mesa

 

[Freestone]

And since this was a simple firmware flash, no professionals or data exposure was necessary, not to mention $60 + dollars just wasted. I guess we all have our own comfort level.

 

[edfair]

The $3000 quote was for a 2.1gb SCSI2 drive with data from a SCO unix system before the expansion of the industry drove down prices. There were about 5 reliable recovery outfits and the customer wanted local.
Yeah, it was high but worth it to the customer until he screwed up and restored the data onto a system with no hard drive in place to store it, thereby contaminating duplicate files on the boot drive.
It wasn't pretty. I lost a couple of hundred bucks. Customer spent a bunch of time recovering. I sued for my money, he countersued for $40K. I won, he appealed and lowered his suit to $25K so it would stay in small claims. Judge suggested we kiss, make up, and drop the suits because he would need some high priced experts to figure it out. We both agreed to drop it.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[Jay10826]

It was much more than a simple firmware flash. Getting the drive recognized by the pc required special tools and lot of work. I found instructions on how to do it, but it was just too difficult. And there was no financial or personal data on the drive...so no worries there. Thanks again though everyone.

 

[goombawaho]

Jeez - a lawsuit. That scares the pants off of me. Most people just say "oh shucks" when their data goes bye bye and don't try to kill the messenger.