Crashed Hard Drive? Help please!

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Asmodeus

1015 posts

Uber Geek

#31657 25-Mar-2009 19:38

I went to turn my htpc on today and it wont boot... It shows the bios flash screen for an unusually long length of time, then tells me to restart and select proper boot media. I went into the bios and I cant see my HDD with the OS on it in the boot menu, just the one with data on it.

I tried Norton ghost to restore and the option to restore to my C drive is not there just the data drive again.
I dont hear any clicking or grinding noises when I turn the pc on but there is a bit of HDD activitiy immediately after powering on then nothing. I guess the disk can still be poked and not make funny noises though.

Does this sound like a physical failure rather than a logical one to you?

Is there anything else I can do before I have to disasseble half of my home theatre unit and half of my htpc to get the drive out?

Cheers

Regs

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Snowflake

#203320 25-Mar-2009 19:46

i woudl start by downloading a tools disk from your hdd vendor. e.g. seatools for dos from seagate.

the following troubleshooting link on seagate site might help:
http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=satatshooterbootablenolongerdetected&vgnextoid=51977c94905ea110VgnVCM100000f5ee0a0aRCRD

Have you recently done any BIOS upgrades?

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Snowflake
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Asmodeus

1015 posts

Uber Geek

#203321 25-Mar-2009 19:52

Thanks for the link. It says in my situation (drive not appearing in bios) to open it up and check jumpers and cabls and if its spinning, etc so I guess Im gona have to do a disassemble

I havn't done a bios update recently, no.

Regs

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Snowflake

#203326 25-Mar-2009 20:14

try seatools, or another disk utility - these can often see disks by bypassing the BIOS.

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Snowflake
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eluSiveNZ

188 posts

Master Geek

#203331 25-Mar-2009 21:19

Is it a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 by any chance?

8d52797c436

264 posts

Ultimate Geek
Inactive user

#203333 25-Mar-2009 21:21

What sort of disk is it? I had a proble, not so long ago where my Seagate 1tb wasnt showing up in the bios etc, just like what you described, and I had to send it back and get a brand new one. From what I have heard it's pretty common with those drives.

Regs

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Snowflake

#203344 25-Mar-2009 21:54

yep, lots of probs and lots of press about the seagate issues. relevant info available on the seagate site here:
http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207931&NewLang=en

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Snowflake
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about.me/nzregs
Twitter: @nzregs

Asmodeus

1015 posts

Uber Geek

#203365 25-Mar-2009 23:26

eluSiveNZ: Is it a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 by any chance?

lol, yeah...

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Asmodeus

1015 posts

Uber Geek

#203411 26-Mar-2009 08:45

Im not even gona wait for a replacement, gonna get a new drive and just sell the new seagate when it arrives. I dont want another one of these

Bung

6477 posts

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Subscriber

#203412 26-Mar-2009 08:54

Asmodeus: Im not even gona wait for a replacement, gonna get a new drive and just sell the new seagate when it arrives. I dont want another one of these

Don't even bother kidding yourself that any other brand will be more reliable. At least you did have an image to restore. What sort of backup does your data drive have?

Regs

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Snowflake

#203436 26-Mar-2009 09:59

Bung:
Asmodeus: Im not even gona wait for a replacement, gonna get a new drive and just sell the new seagate when it arrives. I dont want another one of these

Don't even bother kidding yourself that any other brand will be more reliable. At least you did have an image to restore. What sort of backup does your data drive have?

LOL. Buy a Quantum.... or a Maxtor..... oh wait, segate owns those brands ;)

seriously though, i havent found a brand that hasnt had reliability problems at the low end. Consumer drives are last off teh rank when it comes to quality platters - the SAN and OEM vendors get all the good ones (but they pay more for them too). In this case the seagate issue was firmware based which *should* have been avoidable. Most HDD failures are platter or mechanism issues (after taking out the 'user errror'... HDD's don't like being dropped)

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Snowflake
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Twitter: @nzregs

garvani

1873 posts

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#203453 26-Mar-2009 11:11

Having worked for a computer retailler / system builder for the last five years, we started with seagate and moved to Western digital. In the last 3 years we have had 5 drives come back with problems, thats not to bad when you consider we do on average 30 builds a month. I have several western digitals at home and wouldnt look anywhere else, get the black edition if you can..

Asmodeus

1015 posts

Uber Geek

#203554 26-Mar-2009 16:38

Well Im glad I went with the Green power for my 1.5TB external over the seagate anyway

Bung

6477 posts

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Subscriber

#203557 26-Mar-2009 16:52

garvani: Having worked for a computer retailler / system builder for the last five years, we started with seagate and moved to Western digital. In the last 3 years we have had 5 drives come back with problems, thats not to bad when you consider we do on average 30 builds a month. I have several western digitals at home and wouldnt look anywhere else, get the black edition if you can..

30x12x3=1080. 0.5% failure rate almost looks too good to be true :)

dgashby

71 posts

Master Geek

#203559 26-Mar-2009 16:57

One of the guys here at work struck this problem on his home PC. Seagate paid to have the drive shipped back to wherever it came from, repaired it and returned it with all the data still intact.