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Quantum Fireball ST 6 Data Recovery Details
Quantum drives fail and the Fireball ST 6 is no exception to this.
   
I have been using a laptop hard drive in a sabrent 2.5" external enclosure for a few months to move files around from one computer to another. The enclosure came with usb cord which has two usb plugs; one for data, one for power. It sometimes craps out when transfering files. In which case I just unplug, reattach and try again. But yesterday when this happened, I plugged the drive back in, the unit powered up but windows no longer recognises the drive. I get a message "usb device not recognised." I have also tried the drive in a couple computers running windows 2000. I get a similar error on these machines "unknown usb device." The drive worked on these computers before as well.
..Mark Dennis, Avon, UK
Quantum hard disks are well-known for their factory firmware problems. Factory Firmware is stored on the disk platters in the so-called System (Service) Area of the hard disk. If one of the disk modules becomes corrupted the whole hard disk micro-operating system can't boot up, the drive cannot initialise correctly and thus stops working. If you attempt to boot up from such a Quantum hard drive or read any data from it you would get "Disk boot failure. Insert system disk and press enter" or "Primary Master Hard Disk Fail" or "No operating system found" or "USB Device malfunctioned" error or "S.M.A.R.T. Capable But Command Failed" or some other BIOS error.
Currently there is no way to fix this type of firmware corruption at home. It is quite a complicated procedure and requires use of specialised expensive equipment and deep knowledge of hard drive design and data recovery technology.
The drive is a Quantum(Fireball ST 6). Have a Lacie/firewire, I think I accidently deleted the partition when trying to reinstall windows (but cancelled) and disk management said it was "unallocated" I used a partition manager and some how managed to get it the disk management to say "healthy" instead of "unallocated" using partition manager. But, when I try to open the HD from "My Computer" it says "disk drive F is not formatted, do you want to format it?"
..Larry White, Dorset, UK
The No1 issue for Quantum hard drives (especially Quantum CX and Quantum LCT series) is damage to components on the PCB board. Quantum Hard Drives are vunerable to overheating and power surges which can lead to a burned out motor or blowing a controller chip on the logic board. If the chips on the PCB burn out you would smell smoke in the air. On next boot your Quantum hard disk will probably not even spin up.
The Quantum drive can spin up and the head starts clicking right from the beginning with a regular clicking sound
. More times than not this a sign of bad heads, if this is the case it is very important to perform accurate diagnostics and eliminate a chance of possible firmware corruption or PCB failure that sometimes could also cause clicking.
The last typical Quantum hard drive issue applies also to all other hard drive makes and models, the problem is called bad sectors. After some period of time the platters were the data is located starts to degrade and bad sectors appear.
Whenever the hard drive attempts to read bad sectors it could start freezing, scratching, ticking and sometimes loud clicking. This leads to further damage to the surface and causes more data loss. As soon as you start experiencing such symptoms while reading important files, stop the drive immediately and consider sending it to a data recovery company like ourselves for a free diagnostic. Any further attempts to read the Quantum drive would just add up to the problems and make more data unrecoverable. In our Data Recovery Lab we use expensive imaging tools that are capable of force reading bad sectors from Quantum Hard Disks. This is usually the only way to effectively retrieve data from these Drives. If you experience any of the symptoms described above with your Quantum Fireball ST 6 please call us on +44 (0) 2890 961976. If you hear your Quantum Fireball ST 6 hard drive making some other unusual noises please call us on +44 (0) 2890 961976.
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