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jerrybill

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Posts posted by jerrybill

    Seagate 7200.11 fail & fine dataset

    in Hard Drive and Removable Media

    Posted

    Disks are strange beasts :ph34r: , sometimes (not necessarily applying to your case :unsure: ) imaging "backwards" and in "chunks" succeeds where "normal" imaging does not, see:

    http://www.datarescue.com/photorescue/v3/drdd.htm

    http://reboot.pro/topic/15040-data-recovery-off-clicking-disk/

    http://reboot.pro/topic/15040-data-recovery-off-clicking-disk/?p=133567

    The GNU 'ddrescue' tool that I'm using does that sort of thing automatically. I'm also doing similar things manually to try to find out more about the drive. It's tedious. :(

    I'm now almost sure that the issue with this drive is that the electronics and/or firmware are not capable of recovering from a burst of errors.

    It seems that if there are just a few bad sectors in an area of the disc it can recover and continue reading the drive. But it seems that if there are many consecutive bad sectors then at some point the drive becomes confused and can no longer read anything. I can't say for sure what 'a few' and 'many' mean in this context at the moment. The only resolution to this condition that I have found at the moment is to power it down. I'm looking more deeply into it but I'd say it's almost certainly a different fault from the other two major faults which I know about on these drives. It seems also fairly major.

    I've ordered some serial interface gear and when it arrives I'll see if I can cause a drive restart without power cycling it. May be I'll learn more by poking around in the operating system too.

    Any suggestions for some sort of hardware reset to get the drive reading again? I've tried accessing the drive through a USB/SATA interface and then resetting the USB interface, but that didn't help.

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    Seagate 7200.11 fail & fine dataset

    in Hard Drive and Removable Media

    Posted

    ... there is a whole range of issues with those drives ...

    The question that I am asking is "Is there somewhere a list of the known issues with these drives?"

    The real issue with these (but as said with *any* failed drive) is that the most you can get for free (IF the disk is still under warranty) is a replacement drive that, this time specifically for the Seagate, is very often a "refurbished" disk drive.

    Indeed. As I said, refurbished drives are starting to fail here. It is very disappointing.

    Personally, besides the quality of the original "new" hard disk, I tend to be very, VERY doubtful about quality and longevity of refurbished disk drives (not necessarily Seagate's, any "high capacity" disk).

    A bit like getting a used crash-helmet back in the post. :headbang:

    Paradoxically ... the refurbished 7200.11 might be (IF they belong to those that were simply bricked by the original firmware issue) more reliable then refurbished disks from other manufacturers as they have anyway never been opened.

    If you say so. :)

    In my perverted mind a hard disk drive is only worth the data that is on it, and once you have it, the idea of "refurbishing" them yourself is IMHO utterly risky...

    Please don't misunderstand me. I only want to save time in rebuilding complex systems which contain a lot of installed and heavily configured software plus a huge amount of data. The discs themselves are effectively worthless and after this experience will be discarded, whether recovered or not, and replaced with something from a different manufacturer. I would not recommend to anyone that they attempt to revive and put back into service discs which have failed in this way. In my opinion they are simply junk, and I'll be a happier man when I've seen my last Barracuda drive.

    Interestingly since my last post I recovered another 100GBytes from the 500GByte drive that I mentioned there, in two 50GByte chunks. It failed after each chunk but it looks like it might be data (data volume?) related. I don't think it's temperature because I have turned off the heating in the warehouse where I'm working and I have a desk fan blowing cold air onto the drive.

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    Seagate 7200.11 fail & fine dataset

    in Hard Drive and Removable Media

    Posted · Edited by jerrybill

    ...Please understand how, no matter how much demented/headless are/were the good Seagate Engineers, you shouldn't expect that the WD (or the Hitachi, or the Samsung, etc.) ones are in any way different/better.

    Whole series of hard disk drives dropping like flies :ph34r: have happened in the past to different manufacturers and there is no reason why that won't happen in the future.

    The fact that also the 7200.12 is often reported as failing in a similar manner only shows that the general design (I would personally say the senseless idea of fitting that awful amount of data in such a small container) is *somehow* flawed, but there are comparable in number reports for "High capacity" Western Digitals also.

    Hello again, and thanks for the reply.

    I'm sure you're right about drives, engineers, firmware authors and manufacturers in general. Unfortunately that doesn't help me in the swamp I'm in at the moment. I have half a dozen dead Seagate Barracuda drives on the bench right now. They're going down faster than I can recover them and reinstall, and in some cases the backups are going down while I'm working on the live copies. Most of these drives arrived here in computers bought at different times from different suppliers.

    It seems I'm a little late to the party on the "BUSY" and "0 Bytes" problems which apparently brought this model of drive into infamy. I only found out about those problems when I became suspicious after finding so many dead 7200.11 drives over the past year or so. I've shipped a few back to Seagate under warrantly and they've been replaced, so I don't know how old most of them were, but in view of the age of the original problems with these drives it seems odd to me that I'm seeing so many problems with them now. The drives I'm having problems with are unlikely to be older than about two years at most, even if the computers in which they arrived had been in stock for some time before their sale. In some cases I know that they're just a few montsh old because they're drives which have been returned to me as warranty replacements.

    It seems to me that I'm seeing at least one other problem with them which appears to be neither of those original specific and well-publicised problems. I suspect however that it is related, simply because the drives that I am seeing fail are young, they have not been abused, they are Seagate Barracuda drives and the symptoms are not what I would expect for example from damage caused by shock, overheating, faulty heads, disc surface problems etc.

    As an example, I have a 500GByte 7200.11 drive which was returned to me by Seagate a little while ago as a certified repaired drive. Its warranty expires next January. It failed in service after a few months (while powered up) and now the first 0xB8F6BC000 bytes (approximately 49.65GBytes) is readable with no errors and every read beyond that fails. After some time reading (attempting to read) it, the drive just seems to disappear and I have to power cycle the machine to get it back.

    These symptoms seem to indicate firmware problems to me, which is why I asked if there's any definitive list of such problems known about the Barracuda drives.

    Does this ring any bells with anyone? If I can recover the drives without having to RMA them and then have to reinstall everything from scratch it might save me a lot of time.

    Admin: If this post should be elsewhere please feel free to move it and let me know where.

    Edited: drive size correction and additional symptom.

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    Seagate 7200.11 fail & fine dataset

    in Hard Drive and Removable Media

    Posted · Edited by jerrybill

    I see the previous post to this thread is dated November 2011. Is this thread an ongoing project? If it is I probably have serial numbers for at least half a dozen dead Seagate 7200.11 drives to add to the list.

    If this thread is dead it should carry a note to that effect and be locked.

    Basically all the Seagate 7200.11 drives that I've ever come across have failed, and failed ridiculously early. I'm now at the stage of returning the failed replacement drives that Seagate supplied to me after I returned the failed originals.

    This is gettting very old. It's not so much the turnaround in the drives as the time-consuming rebuilding of operating systems on fresh drives. I'm trying my best now to avoid Seagate drives altogether, and most certainly for system parittions, but the silly OEMs will keep fitting the danged things in PCs.

    Is there a definitive list of the most common failure symptoms for these drives, and is there any reliable way to determine which failure(s) is/are present in any particular example drive? I don't use Windows, so GNU/Linux tools preferred.

    PS:

    I've read the READ_ME_FIRST and FGA but I haven't yet read all 222-odd pages of the main thread. As soon as I've drained the swamp I'll get to that.

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