Hard Drive Failure

[ledzilla]

Ok, so back in Spetember I bought a pair of 1TB Seagate hard drives, and set them up in a RAID 0 configuration. I then proceeded to keep all my music, video, pictures, and other media on this massive set of data storage. Well, while dinking with other stuff, I unplugged all my drives so that I would have an easier time installing an OS onto the hard drive of another computer, and not have to worry about the installer picking up the wrong drive(s). Lucky for me, I go to plug all my drives back in, and one of the 1TB drives wouldn't come back online, and now I only have half the array working. So here's my question(s):

1) Does anyone know of a cheap place to get my data extracted from this dead drive to a new drive? One place wanted to charge me $1,700. that's almost one month's pay for me.

or

2) Does anyone know if the drive would work again if I swapped out the PCB controller board on the drive for one off of a new drive? I know this thing still fires up, I can feel the vibration from it running. It's just that no computer can detect it when it's connected. It just has no communication skills, something I'm sure a lot of us get accused of by women.

[grampaws]

Sometimes just changing the jumpers at the back of
the drive to master,cable select or slave will
let the computer pick it up. worth a try.I have
had drives that only worked on one of the settings.

[ledzilla]

No can do... It's SATA, not PATA. The only jumper back there is to switch between 1.5Gb/s and 3.0Gb/s.

[fastblackmerc]

You can try freezing the HDD. Put it in a ziplock bag in the freezer overnight, take it out and immediately plug it in and start up the PC.

[Jeremy]

A while back, seagate had a firmware error rendering a lot of their 750/1tb/1.5tb drives unusable iirc... you may want to contact Seagate support. They have mentioned in press releases that they may do data recovery on the drive. A quick google search should help ya...

[ledzilla]

I didn't hear about that. Thanks for the info. I'll look into it. Either way, it's still under warranty, and it would only be fair that they take care of this gratis.

[magindat]

In order to raid 0 in wiondows, the disk has to be dynamic. that's why it's not readable on simple plug in. While raid 0 gives better performance, raid 1 would have been the better choice for what you're doing.

[magindat]

windows may not be seeing the disk which would point toward the seagate issue. See if you can see the disk in the BIOS first before you embark on any other heroics.

[ledzilla]

The drive was originally connected via a RAID controller card. The card no longer sees the drive, but it sees the other 1TB drive (it shows connected drives during boot up). I also tried hooking it up directly to the mobo with the same result, and a different RAID card (I have two in my pc, as my mobo only has two SATA ports and I have a total of 7 SATA drives; the mobo also shows all drives, SATA & PATA, connected upon boot up). That's when I tried seeing if another computer would see it.

[magindat]

The drive was originally connected via a RAID controller card. The card no longer sees the drive, but it sees the other 1TB drive (it shows connected drives during boot up). I also tried hooking it up directly to the mobo with the same result, and a different RAID card (I have two in my pc, as my mobo only has two SATA ports and I have a total of 7 SATA drives; the mobo also shows all drives, SATA & PATA, connected upon boot up). That's when I tried seeing if another computer would see it.

Ah, I see. Ever think of using a drobo, instead?

[ledzilla]

A good NAS it outside the current budget. As it was, those drives were barely within the budget ($150ea), but my media drive at the time was starting to fail. When I have the cash, I definitely will be getting a NAS instead. One that supports four drives so I can do a 0+1 configuration.

[Jeremy]

Ya.. BIOS/controller BIOS not finding the drives = Seagate death..

quick google:

http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/16/seagate-barracuda-7200-11-drives-said-to-be-failing-at-an-alarmi/

I built a RAID 5 array for a customer a few months ago when replacing their server.. found the bug about a day after I ordered the parts.. I flashed the firmware update seagate sent me (took a while, had to tear down the array 1 drive at a time, reflash, and rebuild)...
Luckily I noticed it and none have seemed to degrade after the update. Sorry to hear about your loss. You may want to contact Seagate support.


As for swapping the pcb on the board.. that's a no go. Every drive has certain bad sectors from the factory, etc, that are mapped into the controller PCB to not be used. Chances are swapping the PCB would do more damage than good.

In the future, only use RAID 0 for speed for OS installs and data you don't care to lose. 1 drive down = everything lost. RAID 1 (with mixed drives, lowers the chance of both drives failing around the same time) would be better for a long-term storage. RAID 5 offers good performance from a good controller and you can lose 1 drive safely (and even designate a hot spare to automatically take-over on failure).