Help with new Seagate drive not being seen

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I'm running Vista 64bit (ignore the 32bit in the sig). On 9th September I bought a new Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 500GB SATA-II. It arrived, I plugged it into the mobo and everything was fine. It was an additional storage drive so I started putting the data I wanted to keep on there.

After a few days it disappeared from the boot-up screen and Vista couldn't see it. I changed sata cables and used different sata ports with no luck I bought new sata cables (I wanted some better quality ones anyway) and again, no luck. I even took off and replaced the jumper.

To ensure it was nothing to do with ports, cables etc I got hold of an Icybox Sata-USB enclosure. Put the drive in there and plugged in the USB cable. Nada. No 'bing' to say a new device detected. As it did in the PC the drive does however spin up and make the usual noises when turned on

I didn't get enough use out of this drive to finish putting the data on there but the data I did copy is important to me. I certainly didn't have the drive working long enough for my normal backup.

Any ideas or advice please would be very much appreciated. Don't know much about hard drives so if you're going to talk about MBR etc then please be gentle. :-)
 
Thanks for the quick response. Whats the best way to use this? Put the new, non-working drive in the PC, remove the others and boot from the Seagate CD? (My main drive is exactly the same make/size and I'd hate to confuse them)
 
So, d-loaded Seatools text version and graphic version (both for DOS), burned them to a CD and booted.

Neither version of Seatools gets past the detecting drive stage and just freezes. Left one version for around 20mins and the other for 45minutes. Hard-drive is spinning, light on front of PC for HD activity permanently lit but no progress (or change) at all so gave up.

Looks like this is a dead drive eh? Unless there are any other HD tools around?
 
That's a damn good question. I'll shortly be taking the sides of the daughters PC.. she will be thrilled ;-) Thanks.
 
Nope. In fact the other PC wouldn't boot with this one plugged in as a secondary hard-drive. Not found in Bios (which must have taken 5 minutes to scan for drives). Reading posts on this in various forums I think this will be my last Seagate.
 
strange how mine has gone the same way - its been working fine for a few months - then suddenly PC reboots for no reason and bang got same problem as u.... think I may trans plant the circuit board off my other Seagate to see if I can get my files off it :(
 
right - just swapped the circult board from my other 7200.11 and the drive is seen - but it wont boot into windows and fails the seatools test right at beginning :(

Will have to RMA the drive
 
Going to have to do the same but first I've got to consider how I might get the data. Might have lost it but like to try..
 
sorry to bump this thread up but my seagate 7200.11 has just failed and is not detected in bios either. i have tried changing leads and sockets it is plugged into to no avail. i have unplugged it and tried detecting it on my laptop via a usb cable and it does show up, but simply as "usb device" and it is not showing in my computer so i cannot access it at all. any tips from guys that have had similar problems? ive only had it a couple of months and have not backed up my stuff (did not think i needed to so soon):(

could really use some help, especially with data recovery, as simply rma'ing it will mean i lose quite a lot of stuff. also it is spinning as i can hear it and there were absolutely no symptoms whatsoever of it about to fail. no clicks or strange noises, just turned on my comp this morning and it wasnt getting detected and instead saying it could not find winload.exe :(
 
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okay little update. after some further digging, i have looked in disk management and the drive is in there but as "unknown" and "not initialized". what exactly is initialize? will it delete my data?
 
Weird, the same thing happened to my ST3500320AS (7200.11 500GB SATA-II) 2 days ago, only 3 weeks after I got it. The drive just becomes invisible (tried on 2 machines, the same result) :confused: Hadnt had a chance to use any diagnostic tools on it yet. :confused:
 
thing is, you cant run any diagnostics on it because it is simply not detected. Seatools for instance just scans forever without findin your drive
 
i have just returned a seagate drive i bought from here middle of october

Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 500GB SATA-II 32MB Cache - OEM (ST3500320AS)

ran seatools on it, it failed several of the tests so i printed off the logfile and included it in the rma to seagate
 
Omg exact same thing. What is wrong with these Seagate 500gigers. Mine was fine for 3 months then few days ago poof its no longer recognised by bios and wont get recognised in sisters comp either.

I'm gona rma it and asked for data to be cloned to the replacement drive (duno if they will do that but i asked cos its valuable data to me.

Thing is should i ask them to give me a WD drive or somit instead cos im very worried if i get another Seagate drive, will it be new oem or reconditioned drive when RMAing it i wonder, it will end up in a short time dying again with bios not seeing it probs.

Probs should have stayed with Maxtor drives, they never failed me yet well ok i have 2 maxtors but still they been solid for me for years.
 
Probs should have stayed with Maxtor drives, they never failed me yet well ok i have 2 maxtors but still they been solid for me for years.

Seagate own Maxtor so I wouldn't count on it ;) I do have a maxtor drive labelled "7200.10" on the back, which has been fine now for almost a year (250GB though).
 
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