PrOdiGy1

ha i replied to vegetarian saying his was not an uncommon problem and linked to the big thread and the post got deleted, what a surprise! also my drive was manufactured in thailand

Yep, there are absolutely no symptoms whatsoever for these fails, so i do not think that speedfan and monitoring temps etc is any use at all tbh. They work perfectly fine, then next time you try and boot, they are not detected.

Just registered on here as the official forums have become farcical now. The mods keep saying how the forums are not customer support bla bla, but when you get no support whatsoever by email (or just a bog standard almost automated reply) and the phone lines just deny ever hearing of the problem (which is pure and utter nonsense - i spent 2-3 hours on the phone with them and they even hung up on me twice! they simply kept telling me it hasn't been flagged as a problem by their engineers which again i find to be ludicrous considering the number of people even in this thread that have called them about it), where else do they expect us to voice our concerns over one of their products? the behaviour of the mods over there is simply unacceptable. Anyway, I ordered my drive back on around October 13th, had it installed in a system about a week later and then had it die (sort of) like all the others in here with the infamous BIOS disappearing act on December 14th. I had quite a lot of data on there and i acknowledge that it was my responsibility to back up properly, but knowing now there is a clear manufacturer error with these drives, i am simply not willing to take ALL the responsibility for this and Seagate really need to step up with something or they are going to be getting a lot of undesired attention in the coming months. I do not care really about my lost data, but it angers me to think of how many other people are having this failure and having to shell out to get it fixed. so many less technically minded people would not even think to look for a solution online on a forum like this and will no doubt get conned out of their money for data recovery services. All the while, this product is continued to be sold, lining the pockets of seagate! totally and utterly unacceptable and i cannot see how this can be allowed to continue. there must be some industry regulator (like ofcom for telecoms) that can be notified about this surely? I would not have so much of a problem with the situation if they announced they were working hard towards solving it, but their current behaviour is irresponsible, AT BEST. I am no longer willing to let seagate hide this problem and continue raking in the £££ at the expense of pc users. I will be writing to newspapers, magazines, retailers and watchdog (UK) to ensure that the spotlight is drawn on this issue and i am sure if enough of us do this, then something will get published eventually. It might not help us get our data back, but it will ensure nobody else has to go through the rubbish we have. Oh and the details of my drive for the list (bear in mind it was not delivered or installed till about 10 days after purchase): 9QM717SF:ST3500320AS:9BX154-303:SD15:09114:KRATSG:13Oct2008:14Dec2008:PrOdiGy1