FDAXPunter

My apologies for the slight threadjack, but the strangest thing has happened. The suspect is a Seagate ST3500320AS 500GB SATA drive. It was used as an external backup drive with a CoolerMaster XCraft USB SATA enclosure. Yesterday, I tried moving some files across from the external Seagate drive to a PC that had recently had Win XP32 reinstalled. All seemed fine until the drive went all quiet and it disappeared from Win explorer. So I cycled the power on the external drive, but to no avail. Rebooted the PC - nothing. Tried it on the laptop - Nope! Tried it on my wife's XP PC - nothing again. So after some searching on the NET I realised that SD15 is bad and I should update the firmware - so I plonked the ISO image from Seagate (SD1A) on a CDROM and placed the affected drive inside the PC. It doesn't have an OS installed on it, but that's OK, it is only used for backups and besides I was booting from the CDROM. Also, the PC is small factor so it only fits one hard drive at a time. Anyways, the upgrade was successful. I cycled the power, BIOS recognised it, and showed capacity as 500G. Sweet! So I take it out of the PC and back into the Cooler Master USB enclosure. No go! None of the Windows PCs could see it. Grmph.... After some digging today, I discovered this cool forum. So here I was ready to order a cable as per the procedure in this thread and do the deed (after those !@#&^%!@# at Seagate indicated that they didn't give a toss about the data on my drive). Then it hit me. Why was my BIOS detecting the drive correctly (model and size)? So, I decided to plonk it back into the PC - but boot from the LIVE Ubuntu Linux PC (my actual Linux PC only has IDE). To my surprise LINUX could read it!!! WTF? I take the drive out of the PC and placed it in the external USB enclosure. Again, same PC but connected via USB - Linux had no problems!!! So is it something with Win XP and my external enclosure? OK, I took the bootable Maxtor drive out of my PC and placed it into the eternal USB enclosure. I can access it from any Win XP PC. So now I am confused. The external enclosure works with Linux and Win XP - when the Maxtor SATA drive is used, but only works with Linux when Seagate is used. The drive is not bricked as Linux can access it. And this happened all of a sudden. I transferred all this data from it and when the transfer completed - nothing! Now, I don't know if the firmware upgrade to SD1A helped, I never tried accessing the drive via Linux with SD15. I can't help but think that this is a related Seagate issue. I returned a Seagate Freeagent drive last year because that had issues with Win XP, and now this? Maybe its time to go back to WD... Does anyone have any idea what is going on here? I am going to extract the data from the drive ASAP, and then this 'nutcracker' is going back to Seagate. Cheers.