Momentus 5400.4 Dead.

[reallyscrued]

Situation: I have a failing drive in my notebook, an M1330 which I bought in August of last year.

My Dell warranty is up and Seagate's warranty page says "See place of purchase".

If I connect it internally to my desktop and run chkdsk, it will bombard me with "File record segment xxx unreadable". 'My Computer' will not open up, explorer hangs if I try to access the drive to see its contents.

SeaTools - Passes SMART check. Other tests take too long, probably not a good idea running scans on a dying drive.


My question is: Has anyone had any first hand experience using Spinrite? Can it help to the point I can get my data off?

Is there any way I can get Seagate to accept an RMA of this drive?

Lastly...any recommendations of what my next 2.5" drive should be? I'm betting not a Seagate one...

 

[RebateMonger]

Your Momentus is likely a Dell OEM version. As such, the warranty normally comes from Dell. Under some circumstances, the original maker (Seagate) will offer coverage if the vendor won't support it. But it's really up to Seagate. Try talking to them.

In any event, Seagate is very unlikely to pay for data recovery. All they will do is replace your disk with another disk.

You could try running the demo of a third-party data recover program like GetDataBack, and see it can read any of the disk. You'd connect this disk as a secondary disk on anothe PC and install the data recovery software on that PC. But any time spent scanning the disk could mean full failure. If the data is "priceless" to you, then I'd hand it to a professional data recovery firm while the disk is still "sorta'" working.

 

[Elixer]

I would image the drive ASAP. Then you can fool with the original all you want, until it finally dies.

As for what HD to get next, how about a SSD? Don't know what you budget is though.

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: Elixer
I would image the drive ASAP. Then you can fool with the original all you want, until it finally dies.

As for what HD to get next, how about a SSD? Don't know what you budget is though.

Yeah, GetDataBack offers a free imaging utility. The success will depend on how bad the disk is. If there are too many hardware errors, it won't succeed. Making an image would be a good idea.

 

[reallyscrued]

Too many hardware errors for GetDataBackNTFS. I tried re-installing XP and it didn't go through with the format. Drive is toast; but holy hell did this happen fast. I didn't have ANY problems until this morning. Just sudden unresponsiveness, then total crash. XP wouldn't boot after that.

Time for a new disk. Is it a bad idea to invest in another Seagate? the 7200s look really tempting for 60 bucks.

Also, I bought this laptop at the same time my girlfriend did from the same reseller, she has the same model hard drive as I do. Is it safe to assume that her drive will die soon?

 

[RebateMonger]

Disk failures are mostly unpredictable. There can be bad designs or bad runs, but it's difficult for any individual or small company to have enough information to see trends. The only safe approach is to keep backups of any important data. That's very easy nowadays with some really good backup options and cheap disks.

Warranties are meaningless. Backups are everything.

 

[reallyscrued]

Seagate refused to do anything about the drive, apparently the OEM has "all the rights and responsibilities" of this drive.

I assume Dell won't do anything about it, it's been more than a year.

Damn...and I got free RAM from Newegg last month...I guess the universe evens itself out.

 

[reallyscrued]

Originally posted by: RebateMonger
Disk failures are mostly unpredictable. There can be bad designs or bad runs, but it's difficult for any individual or small company to have enough information to see trends. The only safe approach is to keep backups of any important data. That's very easy nowadays with some really good backup options and cheap disks.

Warranties are meaningless. Backups are everything.

Roger that.

But I'll be back to report if both drives die. We're backing up all her stuff now.

 

[postmortemIA]

at least you can get WD Scorpio black 320GB - 720rpm fast n quiet.

 

[reallyscrued]

Originally posted by: postmortemIA
at least you can get WD Scorpio black 320GB - 720rpm fast n quiet.

Ordered.

320 Gig hard drive, 3 GB RAM, Core 2 Duo....this is turning out to be a pretty nice laptop.