ST34000340AS Detected In Bios

[Chonan]

Gentleman, I have been reading for what feels like days here. I wasn't able to find anyone with my very specific issues. So, with that, I'll apologize if it's been covered already and I've missed it. I know having the same questions asked is annoying!

I have the 1TB ST31000340AS with SD15. Made In Thailand.

Like most people, it just stopped working. The one major difference is that mine CAN be detected by my bios. At times, when I boot into windows, it will even be seen in my device manager. However it gives it a generic name and times out if I click on it.

I ran Seatools For DOS and the drive was detected, and it showed the correct file size as well. Running the "short" and "long test" revealed errors. The Seatools Test Code Number Is : 6ED3A06C - Google Reveals 0 results with this code. The one bright side I thought was that it prompted me to fix the bad sectors that it found in the long test. For now I opted to skip this repair and refer to you esteemed gentlemen.

I also have the updated firmware here. But am too afraid to update it for now.

My questions specifically are can I "repair" the bad sectors with seatools as it prompts me to. Or would that cause more problems? ie, cause me to lose my data. Transversely, should I just update the firmware myself? Will this cause me to lose my data?

Thank you for your consideration and time reading this.

[Chonan]

I went ahead and updated the firmware. It didn't help matters. I plugged it in with the boot drive and windows loaded very slowly. Again, it's still detected in bios, but not accessible in Windows still. I went ahead and ran Seatools again and copied the Results.

Device 0 is Seagate Device st31000340as 9qj0j6bs On Generic PCI ATA

Max Native Address 1953525167

Device is 48 Bit Addressed - Number of LBAs 1953525167 ( 1000.205 GB )

This Drive Supports Security Features

SMART Is Supported And ENABLED

SMART TRIPPED Warranty Validation Code : 6EDA06C

SMART Has Been Tripped !!!

DST Is Supported

Logging Feature Set Is Supported

POH 20184 Current Tmp 32

Hmmmmmmmm

Edited December 8, 2010 by Chonan

[Chonan]

I read much on Spinrite 6.0. to recover data from bad sectors. Bought it and ran it just now. Very scary message! . Attached pic.

Should I continue and let it attempt the recovery? Any other solutions or advice.

I have to have this data.

[stans4]

I read much on Spinrite 6.0. to recover data from bad sectors. Bought it and ran it just now. Very scary message! . Attached pic.

Should I continue and let it attempt the recovery? Any other solutions or advice.

I have to have this data.

If S.M.A.R.T is squawking, it's just a matter of time before the drive will be unusable, you'll continue to pick up bad spots. I've gone through this multiple times this last year(lots of drives spinning here). This is NOT a firmware issue, you've got an actual failing drive there, bad spots will NOT be recovered, they're actual defects, the data that used to be there is GONE. Get a spare of same or larger size, quick, and image what you can off of of it. Then send it in for warranty replacement, if you can. I use DFSee(www.dfsee.com) to do actual drive imaging, there are other products. Bad spots WILL be detected, DFSee will let you bypass them. You'll have to determine which files or file structures they belong to later. If it's a non-system disk, you can use xcopy from the command line with the proper options, you'd have to partition and format the new drive first, though. Xcopy will also ignore errors, pipe the output to a text file to pick up the files with errors later. If you're lucky, the current crop of bad spots will be in files you can replace from backups. For fastest transfer, add the new drive as an additional disk to the MB controller. If the failing drive is already pulled, you can use eSATA or a USB-SATA adapter to do the job. Eventually, you'll get too many bad spots and you won't be able to acces the file system. Then you get to see what can be pulled off using DFSee's data recovery functions. So don't wait too long!

Stan