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Is this HD failure?

Muse

Muse

Lifer
This is a Lenovo Thinkpad T60 with internal Seagate Momentus ST9250827AS 250GB 5400RPM hard drive running Windows XP.

The machine was running OK, Windows was booted and running when I last looked yesterday. I raised the lid to check on something this morning and on the screen was this:

ERROR
2100: HDD0 (Hard disk drive) initialization error (1)


Press <ESC> to continue


After pressing ESC the Intel Boot Agent does its thing for a minute or two and it's reported that there's no valid boot device.

When I power off, remove power and wait and then reattach the AC adapter and press the start button I IMMEDIATELY hear a fast staccato sing song warning (that repeats about every 2 seconds) of some kind I'm not familiar with. This sound is coming from the HD. (I put the drive in a caddy and placed in one of my other laptops and it makes the same noise.) There's not even 1/4 second before that warning starts. It seems to start immediately! Thinkpad startup ensues and the HD can't initialize. After 5-10 minutes the warning sounds stop, but the error message above remains on the screen (unless I press ESC and I'm prompted to change the boot order).

My concern is that I have data on the HD that hasn't been backed up recently (over 2 months). Is this classic HD failure?

_________________
"If a star were a grain of salt, you could fit all the stars visible to the naked eye on a teaspoon, but all the stars in the universe would fill a ball eight miles wide." - A Briefer History of Time, Stephen Hawking & Leonard Mlodinow

Dec. 2010: Now thought to be over 11 miles wide!
 
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Could be the sound of the HD's heads crashing into the surface... if so, it is dead.
There was a site that had the sounds of different HD failures, but I don't recall the name of that site.

If that data was very important, then it will cost a small fortune to get the data back, which may not even be possible.
 
Elixer said:
Could be the sound of the HD's heads crashing into the surface... if so, it is dead.
There was a site that had the sounds of different HD failures, but I don't recall the name of that site.

If that data was very important, then it will cost a small fortune to get the data back, which may not even be possible.
Click to expand...
I found some sites. It doesn't look very good. I have some old data, it's not a catastrophe, but not nice. I have most of the data for one app in another form and I'll have to do at least 4 hours of data entry to convert it. The other stuff, I have backup from about 3 weeks ago, so I'll lose 3 weeks of data. It's not mission critical, it's just data I keep about myriad various things. I feel stupid for having trusted that 2.5" HD. The same computer had a 3.5" HD USB connected and I could have used that instead of the boot drive and been way safer. And of course I could and should have backed up the data, if nothing else, to the USB HD. Live and learn...

PS I'm pretty sure it's not the sound of heads crashing. It has the distinct feel of error tones, it's completely regular and there's a pause at the end of the code before it repeats. Very much like an error code. Maybe Seagate can help, I suppose I'll contact their support and at least see if I can get an RMA. The drive is less than 2 years old. I pulled it from an Acer laptop I bought new in August 2009. The laptop went belly up ~14 months after purchase and I've been using it in one of my thinkpads for several months. Presumably, the HD is still under warranty. I hope! Anyway, that doesn't help my data, but I'm not going to spend hundreds to try to salvage it.
 
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Is it possible to get warranty relief from Seagate for the HD? It came in an
Acer laptop that had a one year warranty. When the Acer died after 14 months I couldn't use Acer's one year warranty. I put the HD in a used Lenovo laptop I bought that didn't have a HD. Worked alright in that for a few months, but it's now evidently dead. Bought the Acer less than 2 years ago. Will Seagate honor a warranty on the drive or is it limited to Acer's one year warranty?
 
Most likely Acer is providing the warranty for the hard drive since it came with the laptop. So if the laptop's warranty expired the same is probably true for the hard drive.
 
I would stop flogging warranty. The drive is too old, period. Do the best you can to rebuild your data and replace the drive. I put a 320GB 7200 RPM drive in my old T60, and installed Windows 7. It literally gave the T60 new life and a shot in the arm.
 
I'm giving up on the idea of warranty support on the failed drive.

I have one spare 2.5" notebook HD, a 100GB Seagate Momentus 7200RPM ST910021AS that came with a refurbished Lenovo Thinkpad T61 I bought around a year ago. It came with the factory default Vista Business install, just as it had when new. I used the laptop for a little while before replacing the HD with a Samsung 640GB 7200RPM drive on which I installed Windows 7 Ultimate.

I figure I can use this 100GB drive, but first I think I should insert it back into the T61 and create restore disks so that I can go back to the licensed Vista Business in the event that I want to use that Windows 7 Ultimate in a different machine. I'll have to figure out how to create the restore disks, presumably to install the factory default Vista Business install.

However, there's a concern at the moment. I put the 100GB Seagate HD in an optical drive caddy and put it in the T61 Windows 7 machine and ran Seatools and did a S.M.A.R.T. quick test against both the Samsung 640GB HD (has the boot partition and a data partition) in the machine and the 100GB Seagate HD in the optical drive caddy. The 640GB drive passed but the 100GB Seagate drive failed. Is this a likely false negative? What should I do? I figure I should shop for and buy a new 2.5" laptop HD anyway, just to have something as backup or for testing at some point. Well, it's a thought.

It was a big mistake keeping my data on the Seagate 250GB drive. I had a WD Elements 2TB USB drive connected to the laptop, and I think the odds of that failing were a small fraction of the odds of the laptop drive failing. Plus, I failed to make regular backups. My bad. 🙁
 
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Is there any chance I can get the data off this 2.5" HD using a USB enclosure? I hear the same sounds coming from it and it's not recognized both when inserted as the main HD in my T60 and in the optical drive caddy when inserted in my T61. Am I just wasting time and $5 buying an enclosure. I don't see where an enclosure is useful to me otherwise because I already have the aforementioned caddy.
 
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