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Hard Drive failure issues....*found a way to recover my data, thanks*

L

Lucky

Lifer
Last week my 60-gig seagate baracuda failed to bootup on my homemade ECS K7VTA3 computer. It would instantly reboot right after showing the windows bootup logo. I diagnosed it was the hard drive by doing the usual stuff-removing all PCI cards, my RAID setup, down to where it was just the bootup seagate drive. The drive DOES spinup. I still got the reboots. So I've loaded winxp on a 2nd hard drive and can get the computer working just fine. I figured I could just put the seagate on a secondary IDE channel to attempt to recover any data or fix whatever windows problem had occurred.

The problem is I can't get that to work. I've tried various things.

1. Putting the failed seagate on the secondary and the new boot on the primary, I either get an instant reboot or it will boot into windows, but when xp says "new hard drive detected" and installs a driver or whatever, it will bluescreen and reboot.

2. I tried putting it on a PCI IDE card and can boot up using the new boot HD but when windows starts to detect the seagate on the PCI IDE card it also bluescreens.

So it seems like my BIOS will detect the hard drive, it spins up, but when windows attempts to interact with it the computer will restart.

Any suggestions? I've got some files on it that were backed up but the norton ghost image was corrupted for. The first person to offer a solution that will let me get windows to recognize the HD, access it, and remove even a few files will get some thank you money by paypal.

Or maybe what I've described is something that only a data recovery service could handle?
 
Try the above steps in safe-mode.
Can you copy the files in DOS (there are NTFS readers in DOS, don't know if they allow copying of files though).
 
do you have another hard drive laying around? use a second hard drive as a master and then set your 60 gig as slave and boot to windows with the different hard drive. then see if you can see the files off the 60 gig that way.
 
Re: Safe mode- when the drive first failed i tried booting into window in safe mode, still got the instant reboot.

About DOS, you are going to have to help me. I haven't used that since 3.1. How would I go about attempting to access the drive in DOS and what would I need?
 
Go into the case and see how well (or badly) it is spinning. If it's not spinning well (or at all), try the freezer trick.
 
Have you run the seagate diagnostic software?
I've never used a ECS K7VTA3, but i'll try to to explain if it was mine..

Go into bios, look for the hard drive/cdrom options, try disabling ultra dma, SMART, etc..any options that are enabled that have to do with the hard drive, then put all of your drives(primary/secondary/master/slave) into ATA33 mode(or whatever is the lowest possible)..

if you can get into windows, and have access to device manager, try putting it in PIO mode
also, try a different cable..hard drives are a PITA sometimes, i've had a similar problem before(which was fixed by switching to ATA33)..but later I changed it to ATA100 and it works fine.
 
nick1985- I'll try that.

Ionizer86-Thanks for the tip, but I tried that about two hours ago with no success.


Furor- Good suggestions. I'll see what I can change in the BIOS. Cable is not the problem, I've tried that. No, I have not run the diagnostic software. I'm not even sure where it is or if I saved it when I bought the drive, I think I bought it OEM.
 
Originally posted by: Lucky
nick1985- I'll try that.

Ionizer86-Thanks for the tip, but I tried that about two hours ago with no success.


Furor- Good suggestions. I'll see what I can change in the BIOS. Cable is not the problem, I've tried that.
Click to expand...

it SHOULD work, if it doesnt i would say your 60 gig is toast.
 
Originally posted by: Lucky



Furor- Good suggestions. I'll see what I can change in the BIOS. Cable is not the problem, I've tried that. No, I have not run the diagnostic software. I'm not even sure where it is or if I saved it when I bought the drive, I think I bought it OEM.
Click to expand...


Seagate Seatools link
 
If all else fails, the circuit board might be fried; it's expensive, but if the board is fried, you can get another similar hard drive, replace the board, and if the drive itself is still good, get it back in working order.
 
You could try using the DOS version of Ghost to copy the drive on to another one. If its not a software problem you should have your data back.
 
As an alternative to the DOS suggestion, you could always try booting from a Morphix Linux Live CD and see if the Linux IDE/NTFS code might be able to handle the drive.
 
Get ultimate bootcd or a kroppix cd. Boot with it and copy all the files onto your other drive. Until then, use your drive as little as possible because it's on borrowed time.
 
Originally posted by: BingBongWongFooey
I don't think so. I doubt most people would take the $50 anyways.
Click to expand...

At this point I'm almost willing to pay any sum. 🙁

I've run the seagate diagnostic, it found several bad sectors and ultimately said it was unable to continue, although when I try to boot with the bad drive in a slave position on the secondary channel it doesn't reboot *as* fast as it did before in the bootup process. (still does though.) Working my way on down the suggestion list now. Any tips on trying to use DOS? How does that work?
 
I don't know if this is possible or not.. but would it be possible to try a PCB swap?

It's possible the PCB has some faulty component on it and if you swap the PCB you might be able to get it to work.

Do you have another good working 60GB Baracuda? Or a friend with one, that you can borrow with him (With down payment, ofcourse)

To get into DOS go onto the internet and find a DOS bootdisk image.

You can get a DOS bootdisk generator at www.bootdisk.com

Then you can create a bootdisk from there and get into DOS.
 
Originally posted by: Lucky
Originally posted by: BingBongWongFooey
I don't think so. I doubt most people would take the $50 anyways.
Click to expand...

At this point I'm almost willing to pay any sum. 🙁

I've run the seagate diagnostic, it found several bad sectors and ultimately said it was unable to continue, although when I try to boot with the bad drive in a slave position on the secondary channel it doesn't reboot *as* fast as it did before in the bootup process. (still does though.) Working my way on down the suggestion list now. Any tips on trying to use DOS? How does that work?
Click to expand...

Try the Knoppix/Live-Linux solution first, it's at least a GUI. If you can't get into the GUI, let us know and we can work on a DOS walkthrough. 😉

- M4H
 
I would try it in another computer, too. Another computer, another cable. If that doesn't work, DOS. If that doesn't work, PCB swap.

DOS would set everything to PIO mode, wouldn't it? I don't think it's possible to get UltraDMA modes working in DOS..
 
Originally posted by: FishTankX
I would try it in another computer, too. Another computer, another cable. If that doesn't work, DOS. If that doesn't work, PCB swap.

DOS would set everything to PIO mode, wouldn't it? I don't think it's possible to get UltraDMA modes working in DOS..
Click to expand...

I'm inclined to agree on the PIO-only bit. That'll make copying a lengthy bitch, but it should *hopefully* work. If you're saying it crashes at a certain point, it may be a drive firmware issue in their DMA implementation. If that's the case, the Knoppix will die as well trying to set that.

- M4H
 
It might be possible that he's suffering spontaneous reboots whenever the system tries to enter DMA mode on his baracuda.

But the bad sectors lead me to believe otherwise.
 
OK, I've found a way to recover my files, albeit a cumbersome one. The bootdisks would not work since they could not read my drives which are NTFS. Changing drive settings in CMOS did not work either. The linux ISO would not recognize my USB keyboard so I couldnt get past one of the initial screens.

What I did find that would work was this software which is an NTFS reader for DOS. I can verify that my files are there....and once I get a hard drive formatted in FAT it will let me copy those to that hard drive. Pretty slow software but I dont know what else to do and at this point i'm just glad my data is there. So not over yet....but I'm 98% sure I can salvage my stuff.

I appreciate the time everyone spent in helping me and and I hope if anyone else has the same problem the above program may help you as well.

 
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