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3 TB Disk suddenly gone

J

jrason7

n00b
Joined
Oct 31, 2010
Messages
41
My 3 TB HDD has suddenly vanished from my system. I have a hot-swap from Corsair 800D case, so i changed to another tray thinking it may be something wrong with power/connecting cables etc but it wasnt that. This used fix my problems in the past but im unfamiliar with hard disk failure of this nature, causing the disk not to show up suddenly.

How do i go about trouble shooting this further ? I have a lot of data on it since its 3TB disk from Seagate Barracuda, any help would very much appreciated.
 
Take it out of the hot swap bay and see how it functions when plugged in directly.
 
If im not mistaking i didnt find in the bios either, but i will re-check the bios again. Though expect nothing there.

PS : It was already connected to the MB directly when it disappeared. The same hot swap bay works with other disks.

I remember when i first bought the disk 2 years ago, i had to make changes in the bios for 3 TB disks to even show up but cant remember now. Btw, I have 5 disk, 4 in hot swap .
Could it be that my Windows 7 or Bios / i 7 settings arent supporting 3 TB now ?
 
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Not showing up in disk management I'm assuming? You've tested the psu cable correct? Any unidentified devices in device manager?
 
I'm so far at 2 for 2 failures on the seagate 3tb drives both around the 1 year mark. If it doesn't show up in the bios then no need to mess in windows further. If the mobo doesn't see it, then windows isn't going to either. Did you try different cables just in case? What about in a different computer?

Mine failed for bad sectors. Yours sounds like the board could have failed, you can always try to swap the board off of another 3tb and see if you can get your data. Does the drive actually spin up even though its not seen in the bios?
 
Munkle is quite right but there is a way to send commands through the wire 'off into space' bypassing the normal protocol. MHDD and some other tools do this. But it's not really useful for you now.

Seconding question though: does it spin up? does it repeatedly try to spin up? does it click? does it emit light and/or smoke?

If it's just... dead silent, and you can into multimeter, you could try checking out the Transient Voltage Suppression diodes, they are there to sacrifice themselves during a power event.

They look kind of like this:


Correct expected parameters for typical models: (from elektroda.pl, user elektronik000)
ST DUI C801 - 16kΩ both ways
KVP 81A - 31kΩ and 25kΩ
ST G30 GP747 - 47kΩ and 7kΩ

Beyond that it's transplantation time and you'd probably have to solder the little EPROM chip over to the donor PCB.
 
No , it silent no spinning and no smoke. Where is it suppose to emit light though ? Unfortunately, i dont have a second pc to test with but if the failure was with motherboard ,
how come MB works with my others hdd`s right now?

Dont have multimeter tool, do you mean to multimeter the HDD its self cause the cables dont seem to be the problem to me....
 
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My guess, as others have said, is the board on the drive itself is dead.

At the minimum, you would need to swap out the board from another 3TB drive that is the same revision and has the same version of firmware on it.

You might also have to swap out the eeprom chip from the old board.. but I haven't had to do that in the past for the few drives I have had to swap the board out on.
 
I was referring to the electronics board on the HDD itself. But the best test right now would be simply connecting it to another computer as you mentioned. Maybe someone can lend you a SATA->USB interface?
 
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