Is my hard drive dead?

alex24

alex24

alex24

Soldato
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1 Jan 2008
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Booted up my PC today, and it hung in the BIOS for a while before telling me there was no operating system found. I have two HDDs, one 250GB WD with OS/Progs, and a 500GB Seagate with Data on it.

Turns out removing the Seagate causes the PC to boot up normally, albeit a bit slow (probably as my pagefile was on it).

So far i've tried:

Changing SATA port on mobo

Replugging all connectors

Changing the SATA cable with a known working one

Removing the drive from the PC entirely, letting it cool and trying again

Loading fail safe defaults in BIOS

Booting from a recovery CD

All of this was to no avail, as it seems it still hangs the BIOS. The drive does spin up however, and appears to sound as it always has. It's about 8 months old, and it's a Seagate 500GB SATA-II 32mb cache model.

I've backed up everything of importance previously, but I have still lost a lot of recordings, which is a major annoyance.

Is there aything else I haven't tried yet that would be feasable, or should I just accept i've lost all my data? :(

Also, sounds a lot like this persons experience, could they be linked?

Thanks
 
Put it in a sealed freezer bag and then into the freezer for a few hours, if not overnight and then try again in the morning. If it works be ready to pull data off as quick as possible i.e. treating it as thought it will only work for a few minutes.
 
I have done the freezer trick before, but figured it was for mechanical issues only, whereas the drive appears mechanically sound in my case. Have you had a good experience with this technique?

I guess it's worth a go before I RMA it...
 
If you really need to get data off and you think it is the PCB that is at fault and not a mechanical platter issue, then you could get an IDENTICAL drive elsewhere and then swap the PCB's over. The drives have to be the exact same model though for this to work.
yes I have used the freezer trick a lot in the past and I'd say overall it's worked about half of the time.
 
I don't think it'd be worth sourcing another drive, the data on it isn't that important to me, so I think i'll give your freezer trick a go and see whats what. Thanks jaybee
 
My old seagate has gone belly up and was in my media centre. I resorted to using spinrite on recommendation from ocuk members and it did a dam good job recovering most of my recorded stuff so maybe give it a shot.

But im a bit paranoid about these new seagate drives, seems like a bad batch floating about maybe...
 
Ok,

The freezer trick didn't work unfortunately. There was no change in the behaviour of the drive to what I mentioned earlier.

I've read about spinrite, but my problem begins that even the BIOS doesn't recognise the drive, would I have any hope with spinrite?
 
I doubt very much spinrite would be of any help in that case.

EDIT: Have you tried slowing the drive down by forcing it into sata1 mode? There should be a set of pins near the sata connectors on the drive here: http://www.sharkyextreme.com/img/2006/09/seagate_750gb/diagram.jpg
You never know it might help force the board to detect it and then you can plan your next move.
 
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Yeah, sorry i forgot to mention, I did try that one with no change again. I assume now that the circuit board has something fried on it as a result of a perhaps bad batch of these things.

If I could try a new board relatively cheaply, I would, but I also have no idea where to get one without getting a whole new drive, so it would seem fairly pointless.

Think i'll RMA it and sell the replacement and put it towards a sammy F1 1TB drive, since I was running out of space, and I don't want another one of these!
 
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