Seagate Hard Drive Problems

[sleepyjohn]

Seagate 80gb HD 2.5in

My Macbook crashed a fortnight ago. Harddrive.

Maczone Chiangmai were happy to replace it with a part from Singapore as I was insured. (Amazingly there was another chap in the shop getting exactly the same thing done......and when I picked up the repair and went to a local cafe a friend walked in and said he had just that day picked up HIS replecement/repaired HD. All for MacBook. It turns out to be a well known problem pointed out last year by RETRODATA UK with Seagate drives used in MacBooks.)

As the charger for my backup, an elderly iBook stopped working (also due to a common long known fault) I hadn't backed up for quite some time.

Obviously there is a load of stuff I don't want to lose.

MacZone staff were loathe to let me have the old HD but I chatted to the owner Pichak who I know and he gave me a week to try for data recovery.

I put the HD in a case prepared to use DATA RESCUE but to no avail. The light came on but no flashing.

Decided to get out the tyre lever and open the HD. The disc would start to spin, the arm would start moving, then after a couple of seconds all would stop.

Went to a notebook repair shop in XXXXXXX plaza. The guy gradually turned out to be highly knowledgable. I had said I could hear something and though it was head/disc interference. He didn't seem to think so even before spinning but we spun it up. He was touching the circuit board underneath and said it's warm. He said you will in fact get noise from the disc etc, and suspected it was in fact a failed component in the board causing the warmth.

(Oddly enough the friend who also had failure said his fan kept coming on recently before the breakdown).

Essentially I have an option which is a gamble: get a new Seagate 80gb, change the board, and hope for the best. I give it a 30 or 40% chance.

Anyone have any comments or advice..........and also does anyone have a spare 80gb Seagate suitable?

cheers John

(ps: I highly recommend this repair man called Kasem 3rd floor the right one of the 3 plazas on the moat....he was very knowledgeable and helpful and spoke good English......if anyone would like details PM me.)

Edited September 24, 2008 by sleepyjohn

[sleepyjohn]

Don't all reply at once.......

[Guest Reimar]

Don't all reply at once.......

I can't help you in Chiang Mai because I'm at Samut Prakarn near Bangkok. Here maybe I can. If you interesred in that, just send me an PM.

Cheers.

[astral]

If you have opened the case, you have probably screwed the disk for ever.

The distance between the heads and the surface is tiny

and you have let in large lumps of dust.

[Cuban]

The question is how important is the data to you.

Better if you could take some beers into a shop (the place you mention) before closing time and get him to swap the controller PCB from a known good drive.

Taking the cover off isn't wise at that point, as you had not tried every other possible solution. Last of which is tapping it with a hammer.

Although I have seen WD40 be used to free a drive - that was in the days of 10 Meg HDDs!

[NanLaew]

My experience was each control board is 'matched' with the mechanical bits of the HD it is part of. Each HD has microscopic differences in physical geometries between the tracks and sectors on the disk surfaces and the head; I think head skew is an older technical term that comes close to describing this. Or analogous to adjusting the head tracking on an old VCR? Some of the hardware on the controller board is programmed similar to ROM (read only memory) to electronically adjust for these minor physical variations. IMHO, it is very unlikely that the ROM programming on the 'new' control board will match the settings required for the dead HD.

Other solutions that I have tried that worked with 'bad' HD's was place it in the fridge (NOT the freezer!) for half an hour before trying a power up. However, since you have already popped the case, you will have condensation forming on inner surfaces as soon as you take it out of the fridge. Even if you screw the cover back on, you have moisture and other contaminants inside now so you are screwed on that possible fix.

The other option is inverting the HD, standing it on end or on it's side; whatever orientation it WASN'T when it failed inside the host machine, and trying to power it up.

Edited September 25, 2008 by NanLaew

[Rice_King]

For an education on hard drive recovery, check out the presentations and videos from MyHardDriveDied.Com. Entertaining and interesting.

[sleepyjohn]

Don't all reply at once.......

I can't help you in Chiang Mai because I'm at Samut Prakarn near Bangkok. Here maybe I can. If you interesred in that, just send me an PM.

Cheers.

Gonna PM you Reimar thanx

Edited September 25, 2008 by sleepyjohn

[sleepyjohn]

If you have opened the case, you have probably screwed the disk for ever.

The distance between the heads and the surface is tiny

and you have let in large lumps of dust.

I doubt it Reimar the disc surfaces that matter are I believe "inside" the pair.

Not like it's got to work for years......just once.

[sleepyjohn]

...........Better if you could take some beers into a shop (the place you mention) before closing time and get him to swap the controller PCB from a known good drive.

I was actually wondering if the PCB has to be absolutely similar to test the disc/head mechanism. Do you know?

Taking the cover off isn't wise at that point, as you had not tried every other possible solution. Last of which is tapping it with a hammer.

Actually I heard freezing it sometimes works.

[sleepyjohn]

My experience was each control board is 'matched' with the mechanical bits of the HD it is part of. Each HD has microscopic differences in physical geometries between the tracks and sectors on the disk surfaces and the head; I think head skew is an older technical term that comes close to describing this. Or analogous to adjusting the head tracking on an old VCR? Some of the hardware on the controller board is programmed similar to ROM (read only memory) to electronically adjust for these minor physical variations. IMHO, it is very unlikely that the ROM programming on the 'new' control board will match the settings required for the dead HD.

which partly answers my last post question......thankyou

Other solutions that I have tried that worked with 'bad' HD's was place it in the fridge (NOT the freezer!) for half an hour before trying a power up. However, since you have already popped the case, you will have condensation forming on inner surfaces as soon as you take it out of the fridge. Even if you screw the cover back on, you have moisture and other contaminants inside now so you are screwed on that possible fix.

The other option is inverting the HD, standing it on end or on it's side; whatever orientation it WASN'T when it failed inside the host machine, and trying to power it up.

Ahh just the fridge. That all sounds sensible stuff NanLaew thankyou.

[sleepyjohn]

For an education on hard drive recovery, check out the presentations and videos from MyHardDriveDied.Com. Entertaining and interesting.

I'll be a hexpert before i'm finished. Only question is do I wanna be?

[My Friend Same]

Hey John

a friend of mine had a dvd player that would no longer read discs so he came to this very forum requesting advice. You post reminds me of his plea for help. At first he got no responses, then when he did he had one wiseass tell him to trash the year old player and other responses which didn't help solve his situation. He then just went to google until he found the answer which was so simple, just take the top off the player and swap an alcohol soaked q-tip on the eye reader and the thing then worked perfect. my advice is to google away as he did till you find your answer. you aint gonna find it here but I dont blame you for trying. I bet you will find a similarly simple solution to at least getting your data back

[jackk]

I just restored my backup 2.5 HD yesterday. It had very important data regarding my company.

I used the good old way to do it, as I already did twice in the past and it worked :

- put it in an 2.5 HD external case

- put it all in... the fridge

- don't freeze it, just leave it 30/45 mn maximum

- take it out of the fridge and plug it right away to another PC USB port

It didn't work the first time, but the second time I was able to copy all 100GB data (even though it was on a XFS encrypted partition )

Thanks to my blue Panasonic fridge

[Fred Sanford]

now that's a cool solution

[Cuban]

I was actually wondering if the PCB has to be absolutely similar to test the disc/head mechanism. Do you know?

I can't give you an honest exact answer, along with the comment from NanLaew above, the exact pairing of inside the sealed part of the HDD to the controller PCB will be 'set' if you like during the disk's formating stage. However the electronics of the PCB is designed to seek across the HDD surface and guide the heads to follow the data baring tracks/sectors. I would consider it reasonable to try this as one method during your recovery process.

Actually I heard freezing it sometimes works.

Generally what is being done here is thermal shock to free something mechanically stuck on the inside of the HDD unit. In the past I have found stuck spindles (you can hear the motor stall - stick the blunt end of biro pen in your ear - place the pointy end on the HDD and power it up - helps if you have some experiance of what a working one sounds like first ) and freed them with a sharp tap of the HDD flat and parallel to the top of a table.

The process of recovery should be one of trying the least destructive 'cures' first, each a couple of times and slowly get more serious / destructive as you find that the attempts fail.

Personally I would give it a couple of taps before putting it in the fridge.

Taking the lid off and poking around inside would be a final resort. And only after deciding that it beomes a paperweight after that - reminder for backups.

I have recovered data from broken floppy disks in the past - where the media was bent - warmed and flattened the media after taking off the broker cover - then put in a new plastic cover the data was read with no losses.

But accept that HDDs fail and backups are a good idea, it can happen to any of us...

------------------------------------------------------------------

If anyone has a bright idea to get IBM 2.5 IDE HDD back from the dead I would be most welcoming - Pointsec encrypted - failed during a defrag - now not recognized by any computer I've tried it in. Not big enough even for a paperweight.

[sleepyjohn]

Thanx for all the great replies I really have learned just wish I knew it all last week.

Listened to the first half of the HD repair vids and it seems you need the exactly same board even down to the latest firmware the guy says it needs to be within 2 weeks of the original. Great link Rice King thanx for some reason it didn't come up when I was searching.

Have had a generous private offer of help from one of our posters whom i shall be contacting.

Thanx all

John

ps: Does it have to be a blue fridge?

[sleepyjohn]

UPDATE

just tried spinning up the drive again with USB power.

What happens is.....the arm comes about halfway across the platters (2) then quickly reverts back to its "holder" with a sound "click" which I guess is the arm hitting it's base position in the holder.

It tries this 4 times in quick succession then on the 5th time it settles in the "home" position. It kind of turns off then tries again a minute later.

What's interesting is that only in this 5th attempt is there the slightly scraping type noise on "return to base" I heard which made me think of platter/arm interference.

The fact is that on the first 4 attempts it sounds just fine, just a quiet whoosh of the disc. Also when I look carefully at reflected light on the upside of the lower platter, I can see about the outside 1/3rd of the platter surface and it looks fine. (The upper surface of the upper platter is I believe unused as there is an arm but no head, they are on the 2 arms underneath I believe it is the undersides of the 2 discs which hold data.

The fact there 4 silent movements of the arm leads me to believe that maybe the sound I think is scraping may be something more innocent.

I am right now cooling it in the fridge on the off chance.

Edited September 26, 2008 by sleepyjohn

[kippers]

A week ago I took two 80gig Seagate HDs back to the shop where purchased for replacement, there was no hesitation, they said they'll send it to Seagate, should take 3 weeks for a replacement drirve.

She said they had discontinued selling Seagate due to the large number of problems, apparently they have returned more than 50 units his year.

Sad as Seagate was always my HD of choice.

[sleepyjohn]

A week ago I took two 80gig Seagate HDs back to the shop where purchased for replacement, there was no hesitation, they said they'll send it to Seagate, should take 3 weeks for a replacement drirve.

She said they had discontinued selling Seagate due to the large number of problems, apparently they have returned more than 50 units his year.

Sad as Seagate was always my HD of choice.

Interesting Kippers.......

I have had an offer of help from one of our posters but what I would love is if someone, especially in CM, has a spare Seagate Drive 80gb

momentus 5400.2

ST 98823AS

firmware 7.01

I would like to just swap over the circuit board and see if mine would spin up properly. (my circuit board is suspect). It's a couple of minutes and could be replaced back. I would pay for any trouble.

I can give all the finer details of the model if anyone thinks they may have one.

I believe this board may have been used on Mac Minis too.

cheers John

[Eureka]

A week ago I took two 80gig Seagate HDs back to the shop where purchased for replacement, there was no hesitation, they said they'll send it to Seagate, should take 3 weeks for a replacement drirve.

She said they had discontinued selling Seagate due to the large number of problems, apparently they have returned more than 50 units his year.

Sad as Seagate was always my HD of choice.

Interesting Kippers.......

I have had an offer of help from one of our posters but what I would love is if someone, especially in CM, has a spare Seagate Drive 80gb

momentus 5400.2

ST 98823AS

firmware 7.01

I would like to just swap over the circuit board and see if mine would spin up properly. (my circuit board is suspect). It's a couple of minutes and could be replaced back. I would pay for any trouble.

I can give all the finer details of the model if anyone thinks they may have one.

I believe this board may have been used on Mac Minis too.

cheers John

First of all, DO NOT OPEN THE MAIN COVER OF THE DRIVE. An drive treated like this, except in a Clean Room, has the same chance of success as open heart surgery in the back of a BKK Tuk Tuk.

Locate an identical circuit board. Layout and chips remain the same for a series of each model. Seagate update their board often and are not comparable with each other.

As the board has a short circuit, indicated by the heat mentioned, you have a good chance that the problem lies with the board only and your data should be retrievable with the new board.

If the problem remains then the problem is deeper such as a partially seized moter.

[sleepyjohn]

thankyou Eureka but I already opened it.

Interestingly the guy who does the talks about repair says that clean things overdone it's a way the professionals scare people into sending stuff to them and of course I ain't going to be using it again afterwards. Obviously not using an angle grinder within two feet would help and to be honest I didn't use a tyre lever to open it.

I just listened to talk 6.

he says they get loads of work in for Macs where the drive can't be read by other Macs and of course this is what most Mac people like me would use. He says the way to do it is to use a Windows box and use MacDrive, $49.95

http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive/

He says you can't operate it's read only but you just get the files out and bamaloobamalaa.

1. If this was the case would it come up like in my case, no drive recognized.

2. If so, does anyone in CM have MacDrive?

Thanx

John

Edited September 29, 2008 by sleepyjohn