SATA HD Problems....

[Acuity]

Hi all.

I had a Seagate 500GB External HD, one day, randomly, the drive stopped being recognized by USB on my PC, tested it on a few others aswell. So I removed it from its external HD enclosure to connect directly to my PC internally.

When I turn the PC on, with the data cable and power cable attached to my external SATA HD - PC fails to boot to OS off my C Drive, and just lingers with the on light on, and nothing on my monitor, and the fan stops spinning.

If I turn on my Pc, boot it all up to XP and then attach the power cable to the external HD, the PC immediately returns to the previous mentioned state....

People tell me seagates are quite reliable, so I'm hoping my 300GBs of data is still there...

any ideas? anyone

[pam123]

You're describing a mechanical failure.

You need to talk to the data recovery folks at On-Track and get an estimate : http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.com/hard-drive-recovery/

This is going to be expensive so you'll have to decide how much that 300 GB of data is worth to you.

[Acuity]

thanks for the response pam123,
cheers for the link, will look into it.

would it cost as much to wipe the drive and just repair the mechanical fault...In case, I cannot afford to recover, I'd not want to throw away a 500GB HD, if its fixable for a reasonable price.

[shadowpr]

Instead of paying to try and fix it (which I doubt they would), you should just call Seagate and rma it. As long as it's under warrenty, they will send you another one.

[pam123]

Originally Posted by Acuity thanks for the response pam123, cheers for the link, will look into it. would it cost as much to wipe the drive and just repair the mechanical fault...In case, I cannot afford to recover, I'd not want to throw away a 500GB HD, if its fixable for a reasonable price.

It not really worth the cost to repair the drive but if yours is still under warranty Seagate will replace it when you get an RMA and return the old drive.
What I'm not sure of is whether or not you voided the warranty when you removed the drive from it's external case.
Did you buy it as a backup unit from Seagate or did you put a Seagate drive into an external case you bought separately ?
In the first instance you likely voided any warranty the unit was under.