Seagate 200gb failure. Ive tried everything....

[magus7000]

Hi all. I'm a bit of a novice with this stuff, but hopefully some of you can help.

I have a Seagate 200gb IDE hard drive. It is a slave drive on my 3 year old Song Vaio PC with windows XP SP1. Its only about 1 1/2 years old. Well it has been making noises for many months, but i thought they were coming from a faulty fan.

Last week i tried to transfer some data to my mp3 player and the screen froze. I was forced to restart and it automatically went into CHKDSK... well it found unreadable sectors and even corrupt files that it deleted. I was still able to access the hard drive, and went through CHKDSK again and it said it recovered some of the data (which it did).. and everything seemed ok.

My PC started goign really slow, and i tried running spinrite to recover the other lost data... well then it couldnt find the hard drive. When i try to start XP, it freezes. Ive checked all my connections, and sometimes i can see the drive in safe mode, but cant access it. I tried uninstalling the drivers and reinstalling them, but most of the time the drive isnt recognized.

BIOS no longer recognizes the drive, but every once and a while spinrite will notice it (but locks up when scanning the drive), the Seagate diagnostics will recognize it, but cant fix it.

I tried formatting it.. doesnt work.

Nothing seems to work.


ANY help would be awesome... but i fear my drive is dead with many media files i want.

thank you so much in advance

 

[Nelviticus]

Try disconnecting the drive altogether and booting your PC. Does it still have problems? If so, it could be the IDE controller rather than (or as well as) the drive.

Sometimes you can get lucky by putting a 'dead' drive in an external 3.5" enclosure (these are very cheap) and accessing it that way. If not, your only option may be a data recovery company.

Also, check the warranty on the drive - 1 1/2 years isn't very long and it may still be covered. Seagate won't compensate you for lost data but they may replace or (possibly) repair your drive.

Regards

Nelviticus

 

[magus7000]

i am currently running my pc just fine with the bad slave hard drive disconnected

i was actually thinking about getting an enclosure just to see... as well as a new ribbon just to check


can you recommend a data recovery company? i really dont wanna pay a lot, but i guess if i have to i will

 

[wahnula]

BIOS no longer recognizes the drive

it has been making noises for many months

Two reasons not to throw any more money at this drive except perhaps a professional recovery service. In my experience, once a drive is no longer visible in BIOS that's it for us regular Joes. Off to a clean room and pros. If you have a spare HDD cable laying around, try it, but don't buy a new one unless you really want one for your old drive.

http://www.runtime.org

has some info on data recovery.

Go ahead and buy that external enclosure, and put a good cheap ginormous IDE drive in it for future backup duties. I rec'd an ad email from somewhere for a 320 GB 7200 drive for $69.

Maybe someone will post the "freezer process", a last-ditch attempt in my book. If you by some miracle get the drive viewable, image it immediately! The less you use the drive the better.

Tony

 

[magus7000]

i just bought an external 320gb for $100... i was planning on doing this anyways... i was just a week too late....

ive tried using GetDataBack from runtime.org, but whenever i try to start windows with the bad slave attached, it goes so insanely slow that it appears to freeze... i cant get to the program to run it because the comp goes SO slow


would changing the jumpers at all help in starting windows?

i figure if i can get windows to start efficiently with the bad drive attached, i might be able to do some work on it


i dont care about the actual drive, i just wanna get the date and scrap the drive


thanks for the help all

 

[magus7000]

also, is it safer, or more efficient to image the drive first, rather than try to transfer the data? (that is, of course, if i can access the drive)

 

[wahnula]

also, is it safer, or more efficient to image the drive first

Yes!!!

 

[magus7000]

i bought an external enclosure... if it doesnt work im goin to the last resort... freezing..


ive been reading up on it here

http://geeksaresexy.blogspot.com/2006/01/freeze-your-hard-drive-to-recover-data.html

any advice on the freezing trick?

 

[ArizonaGeek]

I froze a bad hard drive overnight, make sure you cool it down at least a few hours before you put in the freezer and make you don't get any moisture on it. Don't expect to work 100% of the time, mine didn't, but as a last resort it cant hurt.

As far as data recovery solutions, taking it to someone will be VERY VERY expensive. Like thousands of dollars expensive. So unless you are prepared to spend that much, count this as a learning opportunity and back up, back up, back up and back up again on a regular basis.

CD's and DVD's are super cheap now so no one has an excuse not to back up. I learned my lesson a long time ago, heck I still have CDs with archive emails and stuff I've downloaded from 1996. Just cant bring myself to toss them. Good luck!

Cheers
Rob

 

[magus7000]

Ok... so i bought an external enclosure and hooked it up... the computer recognized it and installed it.. under the device manager, i could see the busted hard drive, but it was not assigned a drive letter and i couldnt see it in My Computer

I tried running some diagnostic programs (GetDataBack, Spinrite)... nothing worked


SO i went to the last resort and froze my hard drive last night in the external enclosure.. i just plugged it in and the drive was recognized and i was able to open it.... only to find no data.. the drive was labeled as a RAW drive.

I then tried the diagnostic programs again and they didnt work.


I then took the hard drive out of the enclosure and put it in the computer.. BIOS recognized it. I tried running SpinRite.. it ran for a bit then froze. I then tried starting windows normally... nothing.


Any other ideas guys? Im getting really frustrated

 

[Questbscom]

Does the hard drive sound like it is spinning at all???

 

[magus7000]

yes actually it does

for a lonnnng time it was making loud humming noises, but i didnt know it was the hard drive, i thought it was a bad fan

and then one day the really loud noises stopped... and so did the hard drive

but when i first pulled it out of the freezer and hooked it up, it sounded like normal... and i could feel it vibrating like something was spinning