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Seagate ST93015A Data Recovery Details
Seagate drives fail and the ST93015A is no exception to this.
   
I'm having a nightmare at the moment! Our DC/Exchange(Win 2000) Compaq ML370 needed to be rebooted as it had just installed the latest Windows update. Yet when it powered back up It now does not pick up the RAID drives and POST states "SCSI BIOS NOT INSTALLED"
Then tries to boot up via floppy, network etc Until it gives in and says: "non system disk error" It's a Seagate(model ST93015A).
..Paul Knight, Glasgow, UK
Seagate is the world's largest and oldest manufacturer of computer hard disks. The company has been going from strength to strength with its $1.9 billion acquisition of rival hard drive firm Maxtor in 2006. Segates flagship desktop Barracuda 7200.11 drives, in particular the 1TB - ST31000340AS units, are failing at an alarming rate and prompting outrage from their faithful clients. A new self-bricking feature apparently resides in faulty firmware microcode which will rear its ugly head sometime at boot detection. Essentially the drive will be working as normal for a while, then - out of the blue - it’ll brick itself to death. The next time you reboot your computer the drive will simply lock itself up as a failsafe and won’t be detected by the BIOS. In other words, there’s power, spin-up, but no detection to enable booting. We have the fix for this issues without the need to open the drives up.
Common Seagate Hard Disk issues include, Seagate Momentus - can suffer premature media damage; Seagate U series - can suffer motor damage; Seagate Cheetah - Firmware corruption is No1 issue; Seagate Barracuda - Suffer from firmware, motor and read/write head issues. Hard disk froze while surfing the web , I had to power down the Mac system. On restarting the Mac there were immediate & significant mechanicalwas hard disk clicking noises. Fearing a head crash I powered off immediately and have not touched the Mac system since. This drive is about 3 years old, so hopefully it is nothing serious.
P Burns.
Glasgow, Scotland
Seagate hard drives are vunerable to a power surge or spike. As is the case with other hard disk's Seagate drives controller board is usually the weak spot that will fail. The controller board of most drives stores unique adaptive data that can only be associated with the drive that it was originally a part of. In other words, it's very seldom that you can just swap out a controller board from one drive to another and get the dead drive functioning again. In more cases than not the spindle motor controller driver (SMOOTH chip) on the logic board gets burnt. If this occurs the computer would shutdown completely, you would also normally notice a burning smell and when powered on the drive will not spin up at all.
If a drive is not spinning at all this can mean that there is a seized motor or indicates possible platter damage. Data recovery in this case involves opening the hard disk in a clean facility to work on the drive internally.
I have a LaCie external hard drive, USB2. It has been working properly for like 6 months, either on a Mac or on my VAIO laptop.
On this VAIO, I reinstalled windows yesterday. Since then the external Hard Drive won't show in "my computer" or anywhere. I can see it in the "peripherials", it says it's working properly, no problem, I installed the drivers form www.lacie.com.
But I can only see the C:/ and the D:/ drives, no other one. I can't access to its content at all.
..D Glen, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
The last typical Seagate 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 Seagate 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 Seagate Hard Disks. This is usually the only way to effectively retrieve data from these Drives.
The last typical Seagate 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 Seagate 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 Seagate 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 Seagate ST93015A please call us on +44 (0) 2890 961976. If you hear your Seagate ST93015A hard drive making some other unusual noises please call us on +44 (0) 2890 961976.
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