Good Morning Community.
I am at a loss.
Just this past Christmas I installed Windows 7 on a new Kingston 240gig SSD. I kept my 3 Seagate 500gig SATA drives connected for data.
It's been about 2 weeks and then one by one my drives have been disappearing. I'm down to one secondary drive left.
When the first one went, I thought I lost a drive and proceeded to load my backup on the second one. BUT, then less than a week later, my second drive disappears too. (This is where I put the expletive) WAY too coincidental for two drives to fail in one week BUT the drives don't even detect in my bios. (more expletive here)
Like I said, I still have one drive left, but I've unplugged this one as I cannot afford to lose the data on that drive and am terrified that windows is going to expletive this one up too.
Events that led up to the disappearance of the second drive are as follows:
- Was using my computer (and secondary drive) to play a game.
- Exited all my programs.
- I left my computer for ~30 min. In 20 min, windows 7 sleep mode kicks in and shuts everything down.
- Came back to find my computer in sleep mode, as I expected to find it.
- Loaded out of sleep mode and the drive has disappeared.
- I proceed to reboot BUT drive does not even auto-detect at the bios.
Drive is GONE. WHHHHHYYYY
- I hear it spinning....it's getting power.
- SATA ports work, as I've swapped them around and all connect to my SATA DVD drive.
It's almost like windows has sent a lockout command or something to the drive and it's preventing the bios to detecting it....
Does anyone here know what's going on??
I raise my eyebrow....but I'm desperate.
Tried it. Didn't work.
Obtained a USB to SATA adapter.
- Tried to connect either of my two apparently defunct drives and neither were able to be auto-detected by USB.
- Tried my third drive (the one that I know still works) and USB picked it up right away.
Sad to say, but I think this story is coming to its end.....a conclusion that windows 7 sleep mode has bleeped up two of my drives bad.
It's an ASUS P5K
https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/P5K/
I would like to first point out that the website you post shows that it does not support windows 7.
This is very common problem with the 500gb seagate drives if you check the seagate forums it goes back as far as 2010.
- Did you move your computer around while it was in sleep mode?
- Can you detect your hard disks when you search drives for partitioning?
Control panel / administrative tools / computer management / look under storage/disk management.
- Did you move your computer around while it was in sleep mode?- Can you detect your hard disks when you search drives for partitioning?Control panel / administrative tools / computer management / look under storage/disk management.
No and No.
I'm beginning to switch gears now. I'm hoping that the fault lies within my hard drives....despite win 7 sleep causing the issue. I've disabled win 7 sleep and purchased new hard drives. When I have the data backed up from my third drive (the one that works still), I'm going to tinker with the broken two and see if I can swap out the Sata Controller PCB and recover the data.
Does anyone have experience doing this with a seagate barracuda 500gb 7200.11 drive?
I don't have any experience with these particular drives, but I've previously (read a few many years ago now) used SpinRite to try to repair hard drives that were not accessible normally.
https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm
https://www.grc.com/sr/whatitdoes.htm
That said, my experience then was that it was getting to the point where the amount of data far exceeded the time that I'd have available to fiddle with it, and drives are *much* larger now. I haven't tried recent versions, so possibly the interface has improved.
BTW - this is not something to attempt for anyone who doesn't feel comfortable tinkering with how their computer works at very low levels. If the words sector, partition, heads, and platters mean nothing to you in the context of your hard drive, you might not want to bother.
You might also try Seagate's "Seatools":
http://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/seatools/
...which similarly interfaces directly with the drive vs. going through the OS. However, my past experience with vendor supplied drive recovery tools has been a mixed bag at best (and again, is from years past.)
If you want something surefire, your best bet is hiring the services of a data recovery firm, of which there are any number these days. Prices have come way down, but you still need to really want that data before it becomes a reasonable option.
I've read up on the idea in the past....had a friend whose drive PCB had pickled.
The odds of success are very low...PCBs on identical drives do not always set up the data on them exactly the same...so swapping PDBs can get you nowhere...other than now having 2 drives that don't go....
If they still spin up then the PCB isn't as frazzled as my friend's was...his didn't even do that...
What about taking the platters of the broken 500gig drive and transferring them into my other 500gig drive that works? (strictly for data recovery)
About as much chance of that as glueing a second head on your shoulders and expecting to be twice as smart.....
In a nutshell...it will not work...even IF you had a clean environment to open a sealed platter...
Your only option...if they can't be found by you in the usual ways already tried...is to decide if the data on them warrants professional restoration/recovery...that may cost thousands.
The only light in your tunnel is that the PCB still spins the drive....and just maybe a good electronics tech can find whatever resistor/whatever that fried...and patch in a new one...
All the best GFireflyE! I've had a hard disk fail before, but I had done a complete system image a few days before. It is hard disk failures that really underline how fragile data can be - if you don't have at least one backup (or more).
Once you have things sorted out one way or another, I hope you have a fantastic year.
Best of luck!
I've got a drive that spins up but doesn't post in BIOS or My Computer. It's that one which died about 18 months ago and I decided to go the SSD route for my OS drive. Funnily enough, it too was a 500 gig Seagate.
Anyway, I had thought about swapping the PCB with one that was given to me by my former PC bloke... who BTW is no longer in business, not after the last floods wiped him out for a 3rd time. Point is, I have nothing to lose so I might just as well give it a go.... or I can see an old mate who is good with stuff like this
FYI, since I started complaining here I should close this thread off to.
I read a few more articles on the topic of Win 7 sleep and found out that Microsoft hates old technology. The older harddrives really don't like being spooled up at the same time, as sleep forces...and this was the most likely cause toward the failure of my two drives.
Still have one left, but I won't be using it on my win 7 computer anymore. Also disabled win 7 sleep.
Wish Microsoft would pay for the new harddrives I had to purchase but fat chance that will ever happen.
Now sitting on 2TB of space split among 2 drives. This doesn't include my OS SSD drive.
Thanks for all your comments and helping me resolve this issue.
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