Dell Hard disk failure

When he contacted the vendor, it was told that there is a known issue and god knows what it is! Can any throw some light on this matter?

I suggest you try Seagate again they are the experts.

If this is the Barracuda 7200.11 problem (which also affects some other drives), it is a firmware bug that locks the drive up when it is powered on. As far as I know, you can download the firmware patch from their support site.

In this case, ordinary recovery tools won't be any help the drive has locked up, and you simply can't access it unless the firmware is patched.

For locked 7200.11 drives, I use

http//www.acelaboratory.com/pc3000.udma.php

So far I have recovered 5 out of 5 drives, and all data was still intact

However, I am not aware of this locking problem on 2.5" drives

The hard ware type is Seagate Momentus 5400.3 but i dint find any firmware for it…

Will try recovering though! hope that is not dead completely…

Thanks all for your replies D

I suggest you try Seagate again they are the experts.

If this is the Barracuda 7200.11 problem (which also affects some other drives), it is a firmware bug that locks the drive up when it is powered on. As far as I know, you can download the firmware patch from their support site.

In this case, ordinary recovery tools won't be any help the drive has locked up, and you simply can't access it unless the firmware is patched.

Not really. (

The firmware won't be of any use until you unbrick it
http//www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=128807

A fully detailed guide (for the 7200.11 ONLY, and ONLY for the two common "bricking" problems, i.e. LBA0 and BSY) is, besides the above given thread, here
http//www.mapleleafmountain.com/seagatebrick.html

Seagate has been VERY, VERY elusive about the problem.

And lately i365 after a few documented free recoveries started again charging money for the recovery.

The 5400.3 is an alltogether different thing.
Most probably it lost some "tracking data", such problems can usually be solved, but it is not a DIY kind of job, you need specialized software/hardware, very, very costly (please read as PC3000 - linked above - or similar solutions form salvationdata, if I am not mistaken in the US$ 2,500÷3,500)

jaclaz

There is a version of 5400-3 that fails badly. The firmware (from memory) is 3.CAE, and is normally an Apple product. I have been advised that recovery is very rare due to head damage on the disk.

I did have a PC one, firmware 3.CAD (again from memory) that suddenly came back to life once I had examined it on my PC3000. I only analysed this disk and was surprised it was changed in any way.

I just worked on a Seagate Momentus 80GB 5400.2 firmware version 8.03. The owner didn't know what happened but brought me the laptop. I had trouble creating an image but after a few tries I finally got it but the summary report indicated that the whole second half of the drive had bad sectors. I think that it's very odd that the whole contiguous second half was bad. The Dell recovery partition was fine. I assume those are located at the very end of the drive but have not tested it to be sure. My opinion in this case is that there is an issue with the MBR but why the problems imaging? It would start and run in FTK Imager for a few minutes then an error saying something like the drive was no longer communicating. I was able to recover many of the users files and have asked her to verify that everything that she needs is there. When I have some free time I plan to experiment with this drive some more to recover the rest of it.

The MBR should not affect imaging, unless the imaging program is relying on the contents to determine the disk size.

If 50% of the disk is missing, it could be a head. Normally heads interleave, eg 50MB one head, 50MB next head. However, this is controlled by the firmware, and so may be the case with the 8.03 firmware.

Some disks do fail imaging, and for this reason it is best to have the option to enable imaging starting at different locations of the disk, not just the start. Some hardware devices do reverse imaging.

It would start and run in FTK Imager for a few minutes then an error saying something like the drive was no longer communicating. I was able to recover many of the users files and have asked her to verify that everything that she needs is there. When I have some free time I plan to experiment with this drive some more to recover the rest of it.

Just for the record, this little app (Freeware) has an interesting available copying "strategy" (forward and backwards) that allows for more probability of getting contents

http//www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=7783&hl=
http//www.datarescue.com/photorescue/v3/drdd.htm

jaclaz

I'll try that out. As I said, I think I got most everything she needed but would like to try to get the rest of it just for my own sanity!

I agree that the MBR shouldn't affect imaging but what confused me was that the damaged sectors were 5,735,497-5,735,555 and 5,736,288-143,524,735. The whole first part of the disk read fine. Once it gets to there it would stop until the last time that I tried it. It didn't stop but it didn't read them either.

It is Windows XP Home NTFS.

I installed a new HD and installed all software and gave it back to her so I no longer have the laptop but still have the original HD and the image that I created.