Seagate Barracuda 7200 HDD Failure URGENT!!!

W

weelzSA

Expert Member
Joined
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Location
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Hi all

I need assistance with a failed HDD I have. The drive was one from a server we had running in the office where staff would save documents to ect. Everything was working perfectly util today when wecouldnt access the filesI unpluged the drive and put it into an external HDD enclosure then windows would pick it up but wold freeze a few minutes intobrowsing the folders but Ubuntu refused to pick it up.

After doing some research I found out that it is a result of "Bad Heads", see Seagate section, number 3 .

Now the drive doesn't get picked up at all and I desperately need to get the files off the as soon as possible (liken a day or 2 max). There is only about 300gigs (give or take) of data but as I mentioned it is really important

Please could someone point me in the right direction and also not someone that will rip me off (happened before where I was charged almost 10k then dropped the price to 7k). I am situated in Milnerton, Cape Town.
 
Yeah thanks I have already sent a mail. Just wanted to know if anyone had any ideas ow at thitime of the night becasue as I said really important I get this done as soon as possible.
 
I would not try anything further with the drive.

I would just pack it safely away and do no more to it... take it to the professionals tomorrow.

Fiddling with recovery tools will only aggravate a hardware failure problem on the drive and make recovery
a) more difficult and
b) a lot more costly.
 
bekdik said:
Why not just restore your backup?
Click to expand...

The backup hasn't been running on this machine as it was a machine we were just using while the other machine was in for service. I know it was a stupid mistake but these things happen.
 
weelzSA said:
The backup hasn't been running on this machine as it was a machine we were just using while the other machine was in for service. I know it was a stupid mistake but these things happen.
Click to expand...

Pity. These days it's worth having a USB external drive or two for casual backups. Seagate has just announced 3TB Go model.
 
Last edited:
kilobits said:
You are in Cape Town I see, well then I would recommend getting in touch with South_Bit here on the forum...

http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/member.php/110079-South_Bit

You can also contact him via his website http://www.southbit.co.za/ .

Highly recommended.
Click to expand...

Agreed with this ..

kilobits said:
I would not try anything further with the drive.

I would just pack it safely away and do no more to it... take it to the professionals tomorrow.

Fiddling with recovery tools will only aggravate a hardware failure problem on the drive and make recovery
a) more difficult and
b) a lot more costly.
Click to expand...

and this.
 
Production server storing important data without redundancy...

All I can say is wow.
 
One good solution i know off is this.
Relatively cheap and a "forget me solution" if settings is correct.

1. Buy and Install a second hard drive in your pc. One that match the data size you have or plan to have on your primary hard drive.
Something like a green drive that go into hibernation.
Thus longer drive life and lower energy cost. Because this drive don't have to work all the time.
Why a second internal hard drive?
Because although USB and other is also a good solution, SATA data transfer is very quick and you can do full system backups in much shorter time.

2. Get a system clone program.
One recommendation is Acronis True Image Home. Can be bought online.
Others like ghost is also good.
Open the program and do the settings. Set up a daily backup schedule.
I would recommend a full system backup that overwrite the previous day.
Why? If you choose the chaining method your hard drive fills up pretty quick and your system backups stop until you make space.
And because people are generally lazy as it is, choose the option with the lowest maintenance and people involvement.

3. Acronis will on default choose an external backup drive so deselect that and click on the drive number of your internal drive.

4. Very important create the Acronis recovery disc (this function is available in Acronis).
Write the disc, Label it and store it safely away for when you need it.

I had to do a few system restores and this has not failed me yet.

Restore process

1.Get the restore disc
2.Start pc and log into BIOS (ctl-alt-del) or check the startup screen for a hint on what keys to use to access bios.
Why? You need to change or be sure boot sequence start from your DVD drive.
This might be automatically that way. Remember to change setting back if you want a certain drive to boot after the restoration is complete.
3.Insert disc. (sometimes you have to insert disc and restart pc again because the boot sequence is so short)
(These programs take some to time to boot)
4.Acronis will then open and give you the restore options.
Choose full system restore and it will ask you to navigate to the drive where your system backups is.
Restore.

Acronis and others can also do backups of files/folders you choose. It does not necessarily have to be a full system backup.
Forgive the spelling mistakes, i did not proofread.
 
Last edited:
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