• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Seagate dead. How to fix?

T

tpctcn

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 13, 2011
Messages
383
...FUCK!

Ok, now I've gotten the anger out, let's talk about the problem. It's a barracuda 3TB and suddenly it's not recognized by my computer. When I plug it in, it acts as if it's a new drive. Disk Management shows the drive with 3 parts, one RAW partition around 350 GB and two unallocated parts.

It has actually happened to me before with a 500GB drive. The entire drive became unallocated and unrecognizable.

Now I could try to use data recovery software to get whatever I can get out of the drive and format it, but that's obviously the last resort. How should I fix it? Possibly?:(
 
Now I could try to use data recovery software to get whatever I can get out of the drive and format it, but that's obviously the last resort. How should I fix it? Possibly?
Click to expand...

I would make a bit for bit copy of the drive to a new 3TB and give TestDisk or perhaps GetDataBack a whirl on the copy. A bit for bit copy can be made with a program called dd that is available on most linux livecds. Google for that. This is a shell program so don't expect to see it in a GUI menu..

It's a barracuda 3TB and suddenly it's not recognized by my computer.
Click to expand...

Could you have recently filled over the drive more than 2TB?
 
drescherjm said:
I would make a bit for bit copy of the drive to a new 3TB and give TestDisk or perhaps GetDataBack a whirl on the copy. A bit for bit copy can be made with a program called dd that is available on most linux livecds. Google for that. This is a shell program so don't expect to see it in a GUI menu..



Could you have recently filled over the drive more than 2TB?
Click to expand...

Don't have another 3TB lying around so can't do that for now. And the drive is only something around 1.6 TB full.
 
I asked that because depending on your chipset your PC may not support 3TB drives or may need a BIOS upgrade to do so. If it does not support 3TB drives you can get into a situation where writes past 2TB into the disk wrap around to the beginning of the disk wiping out the partition table and the start of the the filesystem.

A second thing to check is do you have any "Uncorrectable Sector Count" in your SMART raw data.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.

You could have been unlucky in that the drive wrote to the partition table but can not correctly read it back. Although in that case I would expect the whole drive to show up as unformatted.


And finally you may want to look at GetDataBack to see if it can find anything.
 
I know the BIOS supports 3TB for sure. And the drive does show up as unformatted in My Computer, just not as simple in Disk Management. But if that's the case, what should I do?
 
Try GetDataBack.

Did you check the SMART raw data for unreadable sectors? CrystalDiskInfo is a good program for that. A screen shot of CrystalDiskInfo could be helpful to me to try to understand what happened.
 
There are currently 8 sectors that the drive wrote but can not read. Unluckily these appear to be the partition table (since that is corrupt). HDTune can show you the location of these.
 
drescherjm said:
There are currently 8 sectors that the drive wrote but can not read. Unluckily these appear to be the partition table (since that is corrupt). HDTune can show you the location of these.
Click to expand...
Any chance I could fix that?
houkouonchi said:
Is it just me or does it seem like that drive has a crazy amount of writes and reads?
Click to expand...
It definitely hasn't done that much work.
...Unless it's some hard drive demon trying to mess with me.
 
Getdataback scanned the disk. When it was scanning, it found over 180000 files (which is about the right number), but couldn't find any when recovering. All the files read "index info not added". A quick search online didn't give me any hope to fix that either.

Currently I'm trying ZAR to scan it again.
 
houkouonchi said:
Is it just me or does it seem like that drive has a crazy amount of writes and reads?
Click to expand...

That is probably just CDI converting what it thinks the drive is using as a SMART key (usually vendor specific) into a number. 99% of the time when I look at HDD's in CDI it usually shows rotation rate, buffer size and nv ram size, not host reads and writes.
 
Use Testdisk to recover those files, i used on my Hitachi Tuoro Pro that died on me in 2 weeks, managed to recover all of data.
 
I managed to recover the files using zero assumption recovery. It's twice as fast as getdataback and recovered all the files, at least in my case.

From now on I gotta be careful with seagates...
 
From now on I gotta be careful with seagates...
Click to expand...

From my experience at work (% of dead drives, RMAs ...) I would be careful on drives from any manufacturer. A drive can die at any time from before it gets to you to its 5 year life expectancy and beyond.
 
While you are absolutely correct, my personal experience says 5 dead Seagate vs. 0 WD right now..
 
tpctcn said:
While you are absolutely correct, my personal experience says 5 dead Seagate vs. 0 WD right now..
Click to expand...

And working in a computer shop for a year I saw every manufacturer producing dead drives, We went with Seagates because of the 5yr warranty (at the time). I've actually had more DOA WD's than anything else, although I'd prefer DOA over dies in 2 weeks, but I haven't had that happen either.

We have an old Seagate 50GB SCSI drive that's 10+ years old and still running, although not plugged in anymore because it took so long to boot (SCSI Card that is) and the capacity is pretty much worthless now.

I say go with the best warranty/support, and always have redundancy... expect everything to fail at some point.
 
Blazestorm said:
And working in a computer shop for a year I saw every manufacturer producing dead drives, We went with Seagates because of the 5yr warranty (at the time). I've actually had more DOA WD's than anything else, although I'd prefer DOA over dies in 2 weeks, but I haven't had that happen either.

We have an old Seagate 50GB SCSI drive that's 10+ years old and still running, although not plugged in anymore because it took so long to boot (SCSI Card that is) and the capacity is pretty much worthless now.

I say go with the best warranty/support, and always have redundancy... expect everything to fail at some point.
Click to expand...

Agreed. It doesn't matter if you've personally never had a single HDD fail from one or the other manufacturer (yet). I've been doing field-level tech support since 1998 and have seen every manufacturer's drives bite the dust in ways ranging from simple DOA to literally on fire on my bench. Eventually, the magic smoke will find a way to escape. ;)
 
Oh I don't mean Seagate=shitgate blablabla.

I was simply referring to my luck with seagates, lol.
 
defibrillator-paddles.gif
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top