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

[JBJinHereford]

15/9/09 My original enquiry to Seagate Support;

Please help me diagnose the fault with a HDD.

ST31000333AS 1TB drive has failed.

The details of the drive are as follows; Model number= ST31000333AS, Serial number= 9TE****S, made in Thailand, P/N= 9FZ136-336, Firmware= CC3H, Date Code= 09325, Site code= TK. 

The system drive configuration is as follows;Boot drive= ST3120026A 80GB IDE on Primary. There is no secondary IDE drive.

Data drive1= ST3200822AS 200GB SATA.

Data drive2= ST31000333AS 1TB SATA. This is the faulty drive, only 4 months old. 

The fault is as follows;

Yesterday, the system hanged so I had to restart.

The system will not reboot because when it lists the sata drives, it stops at the ST31000333AS drive. The correct capacity of the first sata drive is displayed normally, 190782MB, but the ST31000333AS drive is displayed with a blank capacity. The curser sits there instead, and boot-up is stuck.  If I disconnect it, or substitute for another sata drive, the system starts up perfectly.

The drive contains important customer data so I must try to restore it quickly. There was no drama when it failed, so the data must be intact. 

Oliver L suggested I should run the DOS Seatools. I burnt the downloaded image to a cd & rebooted to it, but the system fails before boot up when the ST31000333AS drive is connected, so the cd does not get to run.

[JBJinHereford]

Here is the first response to my predicament by Seagate Support;

Dear J BJ,

Thank you for sending your Seagate E-mail inquiry.

 

If you do not have an adequate backup of your data, Seagate now offers best-in-class data recovery for all formats and all brands of storage media.  For more information about our data recovery services please visit our website:

 

Data Recovery:

http://services.seagate.com

Data Recovery Software:

http://services.seagate.com/diysoftware.aspx

 

Further information can be obtained by directly contacting the data recovery department in the US at  1-800-475-0143.

In Europe or Australia:  +800-5631-1670 If you have any additional questions, please let me know.

 

Regards,

Jeff

[JBJinHereford]

My reply to this most unhelpful response;

Hello,

Is this your complete response.

Do you think I am making a sales enquiry?

I am not. I am looking for support.

Are you going to give me support?

JBJ.

[JBJinHereford]

I receive another terrible response; 

Dear J BJ,

 

The drive has failed to recover the data from the drive you will need to contact a professional data recovery team.

 

Regards

Jeff

[JBJinHereford]

My reply. I am now very unhappy with the service;

I don't understand this response. It sounds like you are telling me to go elsewhere.

I thought I was contacting a professional data recovery team, the ones which designed & built the drive, the ones which offer support on their range of products.

Please give me some constructive help.

Do you understand my problem? Are you familiar with the product? I am asking Seagate Support for support on a Seagate disc drive.

JBJ.

[JBJinHereford]

Another useless response to my need for help;

Dear J BJ,

 

I do work for Seagate Support. The hard drive has failed to recover the data from the drive you will need to contact our data recovery team to recover the data. The data recovery is unfortunately not covered by our warranty.

 

Regards

Jeff

[JBJinHereford]

I reply and express my dissatisfaction;

So will you assist with my need to contact your data recovery team. It strikes me that you may be in a better position to do that. Do you want to help. I am calling Seagate Support for support - do you understand?

You do make the effort to state that "data recovery is unfortunately not covered by our warranty". Well, thanks for that input. Help me with that statement, I want you to be absolutely clear on this, are you stating that you do not cover data recovery in each and every case, or have you made this decision for my particular case. I want clarity on this question.

So far, I have found your responses confusing, unhelpful and evasive.

JBJ.

[Cantbecanit]

Try this, boot the PC with one working drive, once loaded hotplug the other one in and see if windows recognises it, if it does pull all the data off it and reformat it.

You could also be trying to boot 2 drives with the same O/S's on them, which can confuse the bios and cause it to hang, best way to see is to hit F12 as the bios screen comes up and select the boot order for the drive you wish to boot from.

And make sure the Sata controller is enabled in the bios as well, I notice you're mixing ide with sata, normally best to stick to one or the other.

If this doesn't help call back and we'll try something else, but lets get the simple stuff out of the way 1st.

Message Edited by Cantbecanit on 09-16-2009 02:22 PM