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I'm dealing with the apparent failure of a Seagate ST9500325AS Momentus 5400.6 500GB Laptop Drive.
This drive was purchased on February 23rd, 2010 as part of a Lenovo Y550P laptop.
On August 19th, Windows 7 was running on the computer and displaying a .pdf file. Unexpectedly a portion of the screen went black and the Aero desktop crashed. Within seconds a blue screen of death appeared and the laptop hung while attempting to power off.
When the laptop was again turned on, the BIOS took longer than usual to show up on screen. At this time, the BIOS would display the model number of the drive and listed it as a boot option. When it attempted to boot from the drive, a blinking cursor appeared for 30 seconds and the laptop was shut off manually.
A bootable Windows XP Preinstalled Environment CD was used in an attempt to access the main Windows 7 NTFS partition. However, the drive was not listed under disk management or device manager.
As the drive normally ran in AHCI mode, the ATA controller in the BIOS was set to "Compatible" mode, and SpinRite was booted by CD. SpinRite started fine, but the drive was not listed.
The drive was then removed from the laptop and inserted into an external enclosure. The drive could be heard to spin up normally. A system running Ubuntu 10.4 and Windows XP under VirtualBox was used in an attempt to read the drive. The "external drive" appeared as a hardware device but no partitions could be read.
The drive was again inserted into the laptop and the BIOS was entered. At this point there was no mention of the drive in BIOS and the BIOS would not attempt to boot from the drive.
The drive was again removed and placed in a server machine with a PCI Silicon Image SATA controller. The drive could be heard to spin up normally, but the BIOS would hang after the Silicon Image initialization program ran.
The drive was then placed in a machine running the latest Intel x58 chipset with an integrated SATA controller. The drive was reported in the BIOS, but it was noted that S.M.A.R.T. data was "bad". The disk would show up in Windows, but noted as an "uninitialized" disk, and no partitions appeared in Linux.
This drive was purchased on February 23rd, 2010 as part of a Lenovo Y550P laptop.
On August 19th, Windows 7 was running on the computer and displaying a .pdf file. Unexpectedly a portion of the screen went black and the Aero desktop crashed. Within seconds a blue screen of death appeared and the laptop hung while attempting to power off.
When the laptop was again turned on, the BIOS took longer than usual to show up on screen. At this time, the BIOS would display the model number of the drive and listed it as a boot option. When it attempted to boot from the drive, a blinking cursor appeared for 30 seconds and the laptop was shut off manually.
A bootable Windows XP Preinstalled Environment CD was used in an attempt to access the main Windows 7 NTFS partition. However, the drive was not listed under disk management or device manager.
As the drive normally ran in AHCI mode, the ATA controller in the BIOS was set to "Compatible" mode, and SpinRite was booted by CD. SpinRite started fine, but the drive was not listed.
The drive was then removed from the laptop and inserted into an external enclosure. The drive could be heard to spin up normally. A system running Ubuntu 10.4 and Windows XP under VirtualBox was used in an attempt to read the drive. The "external drive" appeared as a hardware device but no partitions could be read.
The drive was again inserted into the laptop and the BIOS was entered. At this point there was no mention of the drive in BIOS and the BIOS would not attempt to boot from the drive.
The drive was again removed and placed in a server machine with a PCI Silicon Image SATA controller. The drive could be heard to spin up normally, but the BIOS would hang after the Silicon Image initialization program ran.
The drive was then placed in a machine running the latest Intel x58 chipset with an integrated SATA controller. The drive was reported in the BIOS, but it was noted that S.M.A.R.T. data was "bad". The disk would show up in Windows, but noted as an "uninitialized" disk, and no partitions appeared in Linux.