• We’re currently investigating an issue related to the forum theme and styling that is impacting page layout and visual formatting. The problem has been identified, and we are actively working on a resolution. There is no impact to user data or functionality, this is strictly a front-end display issue. We’ll post an update once the fix has been deployed. Thanks for your patience while we get this sorted.

hard drive won't spin up...

Q

QED

Diamond Member
Hi Everyone..

I figured I would available myself of the experience of those on the board here...

I have a 4-month Seagate 300GB ATA drive. Recently, I've been experiencing random BSOD's that seem to be related to my video card driver.

After several reboots due to that, my system freezes at the BIOS boot screen stating that the boot drive could not be found. "WTH???", I think.

After verifying the cables are fine, the BIOS settings are proper, I notice that on-boot up the drive is quiet-- very quiet. Too quiet...

So I hold the drive in one hand while I boot, and I don't feel or hear any of the usual boot-up vibrations and disk spinning that I'm accustomed to from a hard drive... I get nothing at all.

I try unplugging the IDE cable and just using the power cable... I try different power cables, still no spin-up. Just to verify that the power cables work, I plug in an older Seagate 250GB drive and it spins up as expected.

So after that long story, my question is... has anyone else experience a similiar situation with their hard drive? In this particular case, there was no warning that drive failure was imminent. Has anyone had success getting data off of their drive in a similiar situation? I've read of some people buying an identical drive and swapping out logic boards to try to get data off the platter, but I'm not sure my problem is with the logic board...

Any help or pointers would be appreciated...





 
Originally posted by: JustAnAverageGuy
if it's only 4 months old, it's probably still under warranty. Just RMA it.
Click to expand...

Yeah... I know I could RMA it and probably will... but my primary concern is getting the data off of it-- it's worth more to me than the drive is.

It just seems odd to me a drive would die in the fashion... I've had several that have died the traditional slow, loud death but nothing like this. I was just wondering if anyone has had any success in recovering data in situations like this or it's a lost cause...

 
seagate has some tools on their website id try there.
but if you boot from another hd and set the messed up one as slave
and cant see it in windows i would probably say its a lost cause.
 
Two weeks ago I found myself recovering data off of several bad drives, a Samsung, Seagate, & an IBM, so I'm not picking on any brand in particular. On the Seagate, it would stall out on spinning up, delayed by quite a bit, to where the BIOS could not work with the drive. I finally got it going by letting the drive spin for ~10 minutes, then power cycling the computer, and I was able to ghost it to another drive.

But if it won't spin up at all, you're likely out of luck. Someone else here had a topic while back saying the 300gb Seagates have a known issue of one of the chips on the circuit board easily overheats. I know that doesn't do you any good...
 
But if it won't spin up at all, you're likely out of luck. Someone else here had a topic while back saying the 300gb Seagates have a known issue of one of the chips on the circuit board easily overheats. I know that doesn't do you any good...
Click to expand...

Actually that does help... that might explain why suddenly my drive died... do you recall which forum that thread was in?

If it really is just an over-heated chip on the circuit board, then that would mean the success rate of doing a circuit-board swap would be much higher than I had thought...

Do you recall if the symptoms of the overheated circuit board including no spin-up of the drive when powered?

Thanks!
 
you said that the data is worth more than the drive, to get the data you could get a professional data recovery company to retrive it. im sure it would be alot easier for them than most cases.

Gary
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Back
Top