I have a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST3500820AS that I have had for around 2 years. It has been a very good, and I thought reliable, until yesterday.
The day before yesterday I was using my PC with ubuntu on it and everything was working perfectly. However, yesterday I went to boot up my machine and suddenly my machine thinks that there is no hard drive in SATA port 0.
I thought that's strange, so I checked all the connections and still nothing. First of all, I thought it could be the controller on the motherboard. To test this, I took the hard drive out of the machine and put it into a USB caddy I have and plugged it into my laptop. Nothing - the laptop didn't even recognise that something had been plugged in. BTW, the caddy works because I have another SATA HDD in it right now.
I also tried another hard drive in the same SATA-0 port on the motherboard and it works fine. It is definitely the hard drive that has the problem.
I did some searching and found that there is a firmware update for this drive. I downloaded it and burned it to a CD. Then I booted my machine, but the drive could not be found - of course not, because the bios isn't recognising it. So I can't do a firmware update.
It worked prevously, so the issue is unlikely to be the jumper issue explained here. I have reset the bios using the jumper on the motherboard, so it's unlikely to be a bios problem.
I guess as a last straw, I could follow the instructions here to try and fix it, but I need to know that there's no alternative before I attempt that.
Can anyone help with this?
