| Author | Message | ||
     Reepicheep |
I have a friend who lost a hard drive... an 80 gig seagate IDE. It looks grim at this point. It's not the click of death, but it has the following symptoms: 1) Bios hard drive detection is *slow*, and when it finally resolves, it resolves to a very wrong disk geometry. Does this on two completely different motherboards. 2) Manually forcing the correct disk geometry into the BIOS still results in excruciatingly slow anything, and every attempt to do raw low level reads on the disk results in immediate IO error (on both Linux and FreeDos booted from known clean CDRoms). Error persists regardless of what drive settings are used (Large File Access, UDMA, etc). 3) SpinRite (www.grc.com) can't get the right disk geometry, and locks up when any attempt to read the disk is made. So obviously, things are very grim at this point. If anyone knows any tricks I may have missed, please PM me. But here is the real question... though it's highly unlikely, it's not impossible that the problem could be with the controller hardware, not with the actual drive. Anyone have an 80 gig seagate drive laying around in an old system in a junk heap somewhere? I would like to try and swap the disk controller boards between the two and see if that makes things better. I have the exact model number at home, so we can verify it before we take anything apart. There has to be a gazilion of these Seagate drives laying around.... Thanks! | ||
| Zenfrogmaster |
I think I have one in a dead laptop (bad screen) in the garage - I'd be happy to take it out and mail it to you if it's the part you need. | ||
| Reepicheep |
Nope, I need the full size drive... Thanks for trying though! | ||
| Reepicheep |
For the record... http://www.superwarehouse.com/Seagate_Barracuda_25 0_GB_ATA-100_Internal_Hard_Drive/ST3250823A/ps/624 215 is the one I need.. (ST3250823A) | ||
| Natexlh1000 |
Sounds like you disk's firmware is corrupted. Perhaps a new controller card is available from the factory? (you know the printed circuit on the side of the drive?) | ||
| Jima4media |
http://www.drivesavers.com/ Drive Savers isn't cheap, but if it is information worth getting at any price, they really do good work. Jim | ||
| Reepicheep |
Thanks Jim... this doesn't quite rise to the level of the $$$ professional drive recovery. But I will poke at it from time to time as I get ideas. Otherwise, it sits on a shelf waiting to get better. Thats what I am wondering Nate... Its probably some sort of hardware problem with the actual drive (it always seems to be), but if I can scare up a different board it's worth a try. | ||
| Kurbennett |
Have a trick that may work to recover the data. Take the drive and put it in a freezer for a half hour. Then place it back in the system. It may run long enough to move the data to a new drive. Don't remember where I read about it but it did the trick for me. Also not sure of why this technically works, but it seems too. Kurt | ||
| Court |
Actually Drive Savers is the contractor that LaCie recommends. I had a 45 minute talk with them and they are pros. Figure about $2500 and what you get back has no file structure. So if you had 67,000 photos they simply come back as photo 001 through photo 67000. That's not yet ruled out. Bill's motivated by what's on that drive . . . he wants to see if his next bike is hiding in there. . . kinda reminiscent of the R2D2 holding the plans to the BattleStar.  | ||
| Coal400 |
Sounds to me like a bad logic board. Is this Court's drive? I thought he just accidentally formatted? Anyhow, if you send me the exact information: Model, Firmware Rev, etc... Better yet, a snapshot of the label would be nice. I can look around work. The problem is that I still consider a 7200 RPM/80GB Hard Disk to viable for business use. So its not likely that I'll find one in the trash, but I can have the guys keep any eye out for any that go bad. At best, I can remove the logic board from the back of a drive sitting in inventory and send it to you. You can swap logic boards, get the data off, then send it back to me. | ||
| Coal400 |
I read your post with the link BTW... It does not jive with what you state in the original post. Do you have an 80GB or 250GB drive? I can't help you with the 250GB drive. None of our production desktops have this size drive and I do not keep a "stand-by" inventory on our lab systems. Sorry | ||
| Coal400 |
With all do respect to Kurt: Please don't put the drive in the freezer... the drive will catch a cold before it ever comes back to life. (this is an Internet tale that will do more harm than good) Honestly, its not good to put electronics in the freezer then heat them up by plugging them in and blowing worm air on them. The condensation will make your recovery more interesting, to say the least. | ||
| M1combat |
I wouldn't blow worm air into anything electronic... Where would you get enough worms anyway? Sorry... Can you see the partition table with anything? If so and it looks alright I'd say your PCB swap sounds reasonable. | ||
| Coal400 |
Good catch... Now with that logic, I guess you could put it in the freezer to kill all the worms ;) | ||
| Crashcourse411 |
Have you tried running it as a second drive? I lost the address sector on mine and made it a secondary drive. That way the bios doesn't run on the disc and try starting up. Then took an image of it and used a file recovery software bought off the net for $50. Recovered all the old files plus more from the old drive and stored a backup of the image on the new disc. Documents, pics, and videos are the only items that are recoverable though, software like games and such are not. It will even work if the drive has been formatted. File Scavenger 3.0 I was able to format mine though and I am now using it as a partitioned drive that is storage for pics and stuff. I've heard of people that take the discs out of the drive and put them in a new drive and recover the data that way. | ||
| Kurbennett |
Coal, Not a problem, I agree it sounds really weird, but it did work once for me. Had a drive that was expieriencing the same symptoms and after a cooling in the freezer worked long enough to get the data off of it. Could have been a glitch though, tried it with another drive and it did'nt work. But agree that freezing a drive does'nt make a lot of sense technically | ||
| Reepicheep |
I'll shoot a copy of the label... I must have grabbed the wrong link... If somebody has the right part, I'll happily buy them whatever $60 disk is current when they find it (which would probably be a 500 gig drive today and growning daily) and swap them. (Jedi hand wave) *this is not the hard drive you are looking for* (/Jedi Hand Wave) | ||
| Coal400 |
Hey Kurt That's good news, I'm glad it worked out for you. The best constructive advice I can offer about the freezer suggestion, is to consider how valuable the data is. If you're looking at the freezer as a substitute for a data-recovery service, then its probably not a good idea. If the freezer is the last stop before the trash, then I could see giving it a try. ...and keep those worms out of there | ||
| Coal400 |
If I got one, I'll send you the board. Just send it back when you're done. You can use the $60 towards a couple drives so that you can keep a running backup  | ||
| Reepicheep |
You are correct... the link is correct and it is in fact a 250 gig drive... I got myself confused trying to go from memory... 80 gigs is what the drive bios now claims it is. Wonder if you can reflash drive firmware... time to go googling. (probably futile though, I bet there is an odd hardware problem leading to the confused controller...) I'll try the slave thing as well, but I suspect that so long as the controller can't tell you what the drive geometry really is, its going to be unreadable. | ||
| Jima4media |
Ahhh, where is Aaron Wilson, who really knows this subject, when you need him? Jim | ||
| Davegess |
Ahhh, where is Aaron Wilson, who really knows this subject, when you need him? Trying to go 200 mph | ||
| Rasmonis |
Turn it into a USB drive (Best buy has IDE/USB enclosures) and get the data off on to another system or boot up with an Ubuntu CD (http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu) to look and retrieve data. | ||
| Coal400 |
Rasmonis, The fact that he has tried the drive on 2 different boards suggests that the problem is not with the controller. Your suggestion applies well to a bad IDE controller, but I don't think it will solve this particular issue with the logic board. Bill, I think that the firmware upgrade is not a bad idea actually. Did you ever try contacting Seagate for a warranty claim? They might be able to send you a replacement. You can swap the logic boards (assuming they replace it with the exact same model and firmware revision) Good luck, sorry I could not be more help | ||
| T9r |
Hard Drive Recovery by Scott Moulton ... Toorcon This presentation is great. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kx-D1nJcv0k&feature =PlayList&p=516A3C08A0824295&index=0 Consists of six 9 minute videos and the seventh is 4 min. If it looks accurate feel free to share it with others. http://www.myharddrivedied.com/presentations.html |
