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Help me diagnose a hard drive problem

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Jay10826

Jay10826

Technical User
Jan 9, 2005
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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!
 
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If its not the cable, then yes, might br worth replaceing the board

M. Knorr

MCSE, MCTS, MCSA, CCNA
 
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Have you tried one of the working HD's in the non working HD's port?

Have you tried this drive in another port? With another cable?

I guess you could buy another one and attempt to swap the boards, worst case scenario is it doesn't work, put the PCB back onto the new drive and you still have a new drive that works.

----------------------------------
Phil AKA Vacunita
----------------------------------
Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

Behind the Web, Tips and Tricks for Web Development.
 
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If it's still under warranty - don't mess with it and have it replaced UNLESS the data is worth more to you than the hard drive cost. Messing with the board would void your warranty. Just sayin'.
 
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Thanks for all the replies. I've definitely tried other sata and power cables, and different sata port on the mobo. I don't think it needs a f/w update, but if it did, I wouldn't be able to install it since its not detected.

I guess I'll try swapping the board...does it just have to be from the same model ST31000340AS?
 
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betcha the swapping the board will not work at all. there is a romchip on the board that is set for the drive that it is assigned to.
if the drive has a seek issue or platter issue the replaced board will not work
If the data on the drive is worth $3000 then a lab that pulls the data off is worth it

that is my two bits
 
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If the hard drive model has SMART technology, it will reconfigure it's firmware over time, thus two originally "identical" disks will have marked certain different portions of the platters as suspect or marginal, and the data transferred to safe regions on the disks, resulting in different configurations. The data about these defects is stored in G-List tables (G- for Growth).
In reality, all platters have a few defects on manufacture, and factory configuration marks these defects as unwritable in the initial testing. These are known as P-List tables (P- for Primary or Permanent).
These data are stored on the hard disk system area tracks, and in the PCB firmware.
Swapping PCBs is therefore risky, and unlikely to work properly. Furthermore, it may render recoverable data unrecoverable!

Thirdly, the operating system itself via ScanDisk, Chkdsk, and other utilities will mark bad sectors in the file table data.

If the data is valuable, send it to a specialist data recovery company.
 
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Wow - I never heard any of those comments before. Sounds good, but I don't know about how accurate that analysis is (not questioning - just don't know anything that detailed). That's worth some reading.

Bottom line - the last sentence above.
 
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lol, the last drive I sent in was over $2500 and was for a business that did not backup their bookkeeping data...go figure they needed it at tax time.(IRS really does not care that the data was lost on a harddrive)
for them the data was worth over $10 grand and they recovered 87% of the lost data

sometimes lost pictures and stuff like that is worth more then you can put a price on it

flyboytim is exactly right on the data of the drive

goombawaho some of the labs require you pay for diagnostics upfront and you send or purchase a second drive of equal size to recover to. Its not always a fun process and I have sent my share to a couple of good labs in CA..

I have done the cheaper labs...not all that impressed with some of them

wish you luck Jay10826
 
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I know how it works, our company works with Gillware for customer hard drives. They will tell you FREE OF CHARGE how much and what data they think they can recover before you pay anything. They will provide DVDs free or you can purchase a hard drive. They're not a redneck operation.

Extra quick service costs extra cash.
 
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goombawaho do you have any references or reviews of your lab?
I am always interested in a good lab that I can refer my customers to.
 
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Just my $.02 I have had a couple seagate Sata drives cause my desktops to slow down. Once I remove the drive, the machine is happy and quick again.

In my experiance they cause every machine they connect to slow down; even via USB converters.

I never really dug into it but I bet there is something on the board or controller of the drive that messed up.

I like seagates, but that is the only drive I have seen this happen with.


-Mesa
 
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Although it has been a while since I used them, based on the results when I did, I point people to Cherry Systems, Marietta Ga.

They charged a lot, something like $3K on the last one, but the customer stiffed them on most of it by bluffing that they really didn't need it for the $3K.

And as proof that no evil goes unpunished the customer restored the data in such a way that their 10 year history got munged beyond any hope of further recovery and they had to input it again at an estimated cost of more than $20K.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.
 
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I don't have any reviews other than my own. Our company is a national computer support company and we have partnered with Gillware as our source for data recovery. We don't tell the customer that we are sending their drives to a third party, but we have no facilities, so they are our specialist.

I have seen them get data back for customers five times out of five when we sent a hard drive to them. They have a whole clean room operation, etc., etc. I watched a presentation they gave for us regarding how they do things.

I'm not pumping them up for any reason other than I've had experience sending them drives and getting customer data back. Notice I'm not mentioning my company. I don't care to mention them here because I'm not representing them, just giving good advice.
 
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Wow, why didn't I think of that???? $60 to apply a firmware update.

I suggest you follow MesaMarshall's advice and save yourself time and $$$
 
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I'm going to repeat this just for the sake of saving people money. A hard drive data recovery job for a "normal" drive (non-raid, IDE or SATA) should be under $1000 from a professional source. The ones I have seen for 500GB drives were more like $750 and that included our mark-up.

$3000 is like highway robbery UNLESS it's a special system or has RAID involved.
 
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