Seagate 7200.12 isn't working now.

[shawn]

Morning all. I've got a 7200.12 Seagate that I purchased last year
that has gone South. I noticed some strange halts on my computer on
Saturday. Saturday night I tracked it down to a bad spot on the
Seagate drive so I decided to do an image clone (using the Acronis
software) to my old WD IDE drive since this was my boot drive.

Unforutnately when I booted into Acronis the drive didn't get
recognized. So I rebooted again and the drive was seen in the BIOS
Post but the drive is in a state where half the time it isn't seen in
the BIOS and if it is seen it prevents the system from booting into
Windows. What will happen is the system will go through the entire
POST process (when the Seagate drive is seen) but when the BIOS is
switching over to Windows it never boots. (You can also tell something
isn't right during POST as instead of taking a couple of seconds it
takes tens of seconds to POST.)

My question is are there any suggestions to get the drive to a state
where I can copy the information off the drive. I really would like to
retrieve whatever I can get off the HD if possible but I've tried
putting the drive as a slave SATA, and as master without any luck.
I've tried powering down the system for a minute and it still won't
come all the way into windows.

Oh, I should add that I heard about the firmware issue last year so I
went ahead back then and upgraded to the CC49 release so I'm running
the latest firmware as far as I know.

Thanks for any suggestions as I've seen drives go south but never
quite so fast. Didn't really have enough time to copy things off the
drive before it crashed.

 

[Rod Speed]

shawn wrote

Morning all. I've got a 7200.12 Seagate that I purchased last year
that has gone South. I noticed some strange halts on my computer
on Saturday. Saturday night I tracked it down to a bad spot on the
Seagate drive so I decided to do an image clone (using the Acronis
software) to my old WD IDE drive since this was my boot drive.

Unforutnately when I booted into Acronis the drive didn't get
recognized. So I rebooted again and the drive was seen in the BIOS
Post but the drive is in a state where half the time it isn't seen in
the BIOS and if it is seen it prevents the system from booting into
Windows. What will happen is the system will go through the entire
POST process (when the Seagate drive is seen) but when the BIOS is
switching over to Windows it never boots. (You can also tell something
isn't right during POST as instead of taking a couple of seconds it
takes tens of seconds to POST.)

My question is are there any suggestions to get the drive
to a state where I can copy the information off the drive.

A Linux live CD may well be able to copy at least some of the data off the drive.

Ubuntu is quite close to Win, so you may well be able to use it even if you
dont know much about Linux.

I really would like to retrieve whatever I can get off the HD if possible
but I've tried putting the drive as a slave SATA, and as master without
any luck. I've tried powering down the system for a minute and it still
won't come all the way into windows.

 

[Mike Tomlinson]

My question is are there any suggestions to get the drive to a state
where I can copy the information off the drive. I really would like to
retrieve whatever I can get off the HD if possible but I've tried
putting the drive as a slave SATA, and as master without any luck.
I've tried powering down the system for a minute and it still won't
come all the way into windows.

Don't let it boot into Windows then.

Fit another drive of equal or greater size, make a boot CD with a
cloning program like Easeus Drive Copy or Clonezilla on another machine
and use that to copy the failing drive onto the one you've added.
You'll lose all data on the target drive. Some parts of your failing
drive may be unreadable - a good cloning program will skip over those.

The more you fart about with it, the less likely it is you'll get
anything off it.

 

[shawn]

Clonezilla will skip the unreadable parts, if you remember to pick the
right options when cloning.

The first thing you should do after making a copy is label the new drive
as "copy 1". Then make a second copy and use that second copy for
recovery. That way, if you make a mess during recovery you can always
re-do the copy from "copy 1".

If you are used to Linux, it's easier and faster to work with images of
the disks as files, rather than swapping disks around physically -
assuming you've got a Linux machine with enough free space on a
partition to hold the disk image and copies.


Very true.

Looks like none of that will work for me. The best I can do is get the
drive to show up in the BIOS but it never shows up for any of the
utilities. Not with Parted Magic (run from the Ultimate Boot CD) or
from any of the Windows utilities. I guess those files are all just
gone for good. Oh well.

 

[shawn]

Clonezilla will skip the unreadable parts, if you remember to pick the
right options when cloning.

The first thing you should do after making a copy is label the new drive
as "copy 1". Then make a second copy and use that second copy for
recovery. That way, if you make a mess during recovery you can always
re-do the copy from "copy 1".

If you are used to Linux, it's easier and faster to work with images of
the disks as files, rather than swapping disks around physically -
assuming you've got a Linux machine with enough free space on a
partition to hold the disk image and copies.


Very true.

Looks like none of that will work for me. The best I can do is get the
drive to show up in the BIOS but it never shows up for any of the
utilities. Not with Parted Magic (run from the Ultimate Boot CD) or
from any of the Windows utilities. I guess those files are all just
gone for good. Oh well.

 

[Mike Tomlinson]

If you are used to Linux, it's easier and faster to work with images of
the disks as files, rather than swapping disks around physically -

That's very true. I've just imaged an OpenVMS* system disk which I
needed to migrate to a new computer. Linux and dd did the trick, and I
now have a backup copy of the original system in an image file which I
wrote to another disk for the target system.

* OpenVMS has a weird disk format, with no partition table, so I needed
to use something that would do a blind copy without any clever stuff.

For those who are familiar with Linux, ddrescue is very good for dealing
with disks with bad sectors.

 

[Mike Tomlinson]

Looks like none of that will work for me. The best I can do is get the
drive to show up in the BIOS but it never shows up for any of the
utilities. Not with Parted Magic (run from the Ultimate Boot CD) or
from any of the Windows utilities. I guess those files are all just
gone for good. Oh well.

Try Linux and ddrescue.

 

[shawn]

Most of these sort of utility disks already use Linux. The problem is
either with the controller on the disk, the controller on the
motherboard, or the cable between them.

Correct. With the UBCD it's booting up linux and is using tools that
try to attach to the disk drive at a low level. If they aren't finding
the drive I doubt anything will.

The only other thing worth trying is an external caddy or USB enclosure,
and different cables.

I did try different cables just in case that might be part of the
problem without any luck. Since the drive was mounted internally no
concerns about a faulty USB enclosure.

If that doesn't help, your choices are to dump the disk, or pass it on
to professional services (who will have no problem replacing the
controller as needed).

It's not worth while paying for a professional recovery given the
cost.