Barracuda XT, Barracuda, Barracuda Green, DiamondMax and other desktop SATA and IDE drives

[april03]

I have a Barracuda 7200.12, 500Gb with me that I use as a slave for where I store my recent captured photos and videos from my dslr. While I was editing some photos on the machine, the PC hang ups and restarts.. Then drive cannot be detected anymore. Tried to change cables and even to other machines but bios or disk manager cannot see the drive anymore although it still has a power on it.

It still has RMA Warranty but as per checking Warranty does not covers data recovery.

What can I do to retrieve files on the drive? I badly need those.

April

[Hammey]

Hi you can send your drive to a data recovery company which can cost a lot. Here is seagates page on it. http://www.seagate.com/services-software/data-recovery-services/

[april03]

by the way, the drive was NOT Detected on My Computer and Disk Management, BUT Can be seen on Bios and Disk Manager...

[Max4root]

Hello april03,

nearly the same happened to my 7200.12 (ST250DM000) drive. I have spend a few hours on searching for particular this and similar problems with the 7200.11 series. My idea now is that there could be also a firmware fault in this series of drives.

Although I feel as a beginner in learning something about HDD´s but with 25 years experience in "pc-things" and little knowledge in electronic stuff i will try to do a Do-it-yourself fix.

First you should consider the help of a prof. data recovery company, when you got some important data on your faulty hdd. Because anything you try by your own my lead to bigger problems or even to a complete loss of your data without any chance of recovery.

Please search for "7200.11 fix" and "RS 232 to TTL" converter. You might get some ideas to do a diagnosis of your drive. I will do so in a few hours, but my data on that drive is not very important/ has been backed up a few weeks before the crash.

[fzabkar]

@april03, does the drive appear in BIOS with its correct model number and full capacity?

[april03]

yes i guess.. all i remember is it starts with ST******

im a bit afraid to plug in to machine that it might get worst..

[fzabkar]

If your data are vital, and you don't feel comfortable with DIY, then you don't really have any choice but to engage a professional data recovery service. If you choose the latter, then I would suggest that you shouldn't pay more than US800 plus parts.

As for your answer to my question, it really wasn't very helpful. Sometimes there is any easy DIY fix, but it depends on how the drive identifies itself.

For example, see Q8:
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/HDD/HDD_Capacity_FAQ.html