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New Seagate HDD failure

S

SBMongoos

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jul 22, 2001
Messages
1,134
Looking for help on this situation with large Seagate HDD:

Purchased a brand new retail Seagate 400gb drive. Installed it in a USB external enclosure. Worked fine. Last week I was suddenly having issues accessing the drive. I called Tech Support. They had me replace the USB cable and it worked (duh - on my part, or so I thought). The same day I put the orginal USB cable back and it continued to work. However this past Saturday I was not able to turn the external enclosure on with the power switch. So I took out the Seagate drive and tried two other drives. I was able to see these other two drives just fine and access them (Windows XP Pro) . I even completed a data backup to one of them however the backup program reported corrupt data after completing it's verification.

I decided to install this Seagater drive into one of my mobile racks on my PC. I booted up the PC and suddenly there was a nice smell coming from it. I turned it off a.s.a.p. I was concerned the Seagate toasted my mobile rack so I put the orignal drive back into the rack and sure enough even the power light would not come on the mobile rack. Tried another drive. No luck. I have two identical mobile racks installed so I was able to test further. I discovered that the mobile rack tray is fine but the rack itself that's installed in the bay had it's controller fried. Seagate will, of course, only replace the drive. I bought it retail on 8/11/06.

My question is this. It seems clear to me that this Seagate drive damaged the controller on the USB Enclosure and the controller on the one mobile rack. I see no other way around it as everything was working fine previous. Yet, I've never run into this in all my years of dealing with computer hardware. Can anyone confirm this? Now I have to send back this Seagate drive with all kinds of personal data and I don't know how to remove it since I cannot access the drive. Anyone have any idea on how to do this? I fear if I connect it directly to my motherboard that I'll fry the controller on the board.

Thanks in advance..
 
Have you thought that maybe it was the controller on your external drive enclosure that maybe caused the drive to go bad and not vice versa?
 
Possible. But then how would you exlpain the sudden failure of the controller on the mobile rack. Never had any trouble with either of them and I also then two rack I got for my buddy never had issues either. That's why I went the route of the drive.

I'm curious as two what the USB enclosure could have caused. Thoughts? I'd already been running it two years with a 200gb drive that was replaced with this 400gb.
 
The usb controller could have corrupted the drive, which then corrupted your mobile rack. what chipset does your ext. enclosure use? what model ext. enclosure is it?
 
enginurd said:
The usb controller could have corrupted the drive, which then corrupted your mobile rack. what chipset does your ext. enclosure use? what model ext. enclosure is it?
Click to expand...

Nothing else makes sense but what you've said as this is what I think happened.

The label on the side of the drive says "Speed Metal Hard Disk Drive". I see a small black chip with PL-2507 and underneath 03344B. Not sure on the 03344B as the print is so small. On the back of the case is a sticker that says "NO. A055827".

This is it here and I bought it at this site as well:

http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=BLK-SMMGB-35U2-N

HOWEVER, I will say I've been running a 40gig drive since without issues and tested 200g previous that died in this enclosure. Well, I did a backup with Acronis to the 40g and when it completed verification of the backup file it did say the file was corrupted.

Also, is there a way to wipe out the data on this 400g Seagate before I ship it back? Do I need to find a big magnet to sit it on or something?
 
Anyone know of a way to wipe out data on a HDD. I cannot access it to do it any of the usual ways. Maybe a magnet or something?
 
dban or eraser. household magnets are not powerful enough to flip the bits
 
protias said:
dban or eraser. household magnets are not powerful enough to flip the bits
Click to expand...

What is dban or eraser?

I cannot communicate with this drive. It's done. I cannot use software, as previously mentioned, to wipe the drive. I need another method.
 
SBMongoos said:
What is dban or eraser?

I cannot communicate with this drive. It's done. I cannot use software, as previously mentioned, to wipe the drive. I need another method.
Click to expand...

if you cannot communicate with the drive (and hence you are unable to use it), why not use the trusty ol' hammer?

then again, if you do want to use the drive, put it in another machine and see if it works there...maybe?
 
Na, the drive is toast and it needs to be shipped back to Seagate as a warranty exchange. I have data on it I wanted to get rid of.
 
SBMongoos said:
Na, the drive is toast and it needs to be shipped back to Seagate as a warranty exchange. I have data on it I wanted to get rid of.
Click to expand...

have you tried a linux live cd to boot and then try to access the drive? you should be able to get your data off of it. not sure if linux has a native eraser program though.
 
Curious. Is the idea that another OS will be able to talk to the drive the idea here?
 
SBMongoos said:
Curious. Is the idea that another OS will be able to talk to the drive the idea here?
Click to expand...
Apparently so, and I don't think it works.
You have what sounds to be a straightforward hardware failure and even linux can't magically fix that.
If you have a similar drive it may be possible to swap controller cards...I've always wondered if that would work.
 
i dont claim my solution will work, but it is another stab at recovering and deleted data. if the drive is DEAD dead, then this will not work and the data will remain on that drive. unless of course you send it out to a data recovery company and then send the drive back to seagate. but that probably will void the warrenty (and mostly likely not get your drive back if you send it out)
 
Don't worry about the data on the drive going back to Seagate, they have very strict rules on the handling on returned drives.
 
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