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Seagate ST9320421AS Data Recovery Details
Seagate drives fail and the ST9320421AS is no exception to this.
   
Scrambled files on portable hard drive after some sort of failure?
One morning after successfully using the external portable drive the previous night, I noticed that it was not showing up in My Computer, but wasn't accessible any longer. Drive is a ST9320421AS. Wiped crud off circuit board. Didn't seem to accomplish anything. It showing no capacity and no files.
..N Patel, Hampshire, 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. 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
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 believe circuit board on my hard drive has burnt out due to a power surge. The Hard Disk does not spin and appears to be dead. There is smoke coming from the device. Your website states that this is a common problem and data recovery is possible. I would like to do this and would like to know the cost and where to send the device.Drive is Seagate(ST9320421AS model).
Mary Firth. Manchester
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 ST9320421AS please call us on +44 (0) 2890 961976. If you hear your Seagate ST9320421AS hard drive making some other unusual noises please call us on +44 (0) 2890 961976.
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