Seagate 500G just stopped?

[jsteph]

Hi all,
I have a Seagate 500G Sata drive (7200.10) and the motor just stopped working. I was my backup drive, and usually was idle under the XP power management power-down setting.

There was no crash, no strange sounds, I just noticed that my drive letter was missing from explorer and rebooted and it didn't list in the ide/sata list at bootup.

I pulled the side cover off and felt it and it was cool, and I felt no 'humming' or movement at all, it was totally powered down. I understand it being powered down after the 20-min setting, but when I boot it should spin and be detected but it's a dead dog.

I'm wondering if indeed the motor died or if this is a common occurrence with this drive and I just need to give it some command in the cmos setup or something.

It's only a few months old and really had little use so I can't believe it wore out.
Thanks for any help,
--Jim

 

[ski]

Make sure the SATA controller is enabled in BIOS.
If ok, then connect the drive to a different SATA port.
If NG, then try different interface and power cables.
If NG, then see if the drive works on another system.
If NG, then the drive may be defective.

 

[jsteph]

Thanks ski,
It looks like it's going to be a dead drive. I did try a 'known-good' sata power and data cable that I unplugged from another working drive on the system and no go.

There was an earlier case where the sata channel became disabled in bios, but in that case the drive was warm and spinning--just not recognized. This time it's cool and lifeless.

I'm sticking with Western Digital from now on, I've never had a WD fail, ever.

As a side note, I have another similar seagate that failed in a different way (motor works, but thousands of bad sectors)--anyway, since I've written off the drive as a total loss, I'm going have some fun and fashion a makeshift clean-room and try to swap the motor/platters and give it a whirl.

Many years ago for kicks I took an old drive, took the cover completely off and ran it open. I did a bunch of copying back and forth to that drive and was able to watch the heads click back and forth, and it ran error free for about an hour, then dust finally started causing read/write failures. But it was shocking that it ran error free wide open in a non-clean room, for an hour.
--Jim

 

[edfair]

Have you checked for warranty?


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

 

[jsteph]

I did run another know-good sata drive in the sata port the bad drive was on, and the good drive spun up fine. I actually tried this bad drive in all 4 sata slots and with different power connectors and all no-go.

I've sent it back to seagate, they will give me a 'refurbished' on free. So I'm back to square one: an unreliable drive that may fail at any minute.
--Jim