Seagate 7200.11 malediction

[jaclaz]

Actually (and strangely enough ) the title is somehow linguistically accurate.

Malediction - which has now more commonly the meaning of "curse" has originally also the meaning of "slander", and in this less used meaning it applies perfectly:

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=malediction

Joyvalle has a *somehow* failing hard disk that happens to be a Seagate 7200.11 and, knowing the extremely bad fame that this model has gained, assumed that the disk was "bricked", affected by either BSY or LBA0 (the known issues that affect at least a specific model/period of production/version of firmware) and posted on the huge mega-thread about those issues:

http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/128807-the-solution-for-seagate-720011-hdds/?p=1066364

and was invited to start a new separate thread.

A suitable title could be :

barking up the wrong tree disk

but more seriously, it could be:

Cannot mount partition/assign drive letter

jaclaz

[dencorso]

Well... I guess you've convinced me: let's let the original title stand for the time being...

When you all solve the problem, then we may reevaluate this point.

[joyvalle]

Hi Jaclaz,

@dencorso About the name, ofc, it is not precise enough .... but when I posted to the forum, I didn't know the issue with the hard drive but It seemed to be related to the "seagate 7200.11 malediction" (You can find traces of this malediction in ancient written documents ... )

@Jaclaz Do I have to start crying the loss of my data ?

Press Ctrl-C to interrupt
Initial status (read from logfile)
rescued: 3715 MB, errsize: 0 B, errors: 0
Current status
rescued: 3827 MB, errsize: 996 GB, current rate: 0 B/s
ipos: 1 TB, errors: 18, average rate: 548 B/s
opos: 1 TB, time from last successful read: 2.3 d
Finished

2 days and 7 hours for 3 Gb on 1 Tb :'(.

If this is not a malediction, I don't know what it is ...

Is there anything else I can try?

Does Seagate or an other company has a chance to recover the data?

Thks

Sad KiD

[jaclaz]

@Jaclaz Do I have to start crying the loss of my data ?

Well, at least you have to start crying for the money that it will cost you recovering them (if possible) .

Have you tried imaging backwards? (sometimes it helps)

Is there anything else I can try?

Not really.

Does Seagate or an other company has a chance to recover the data?

Seagate had a division, called i365, that did data recovery and AFAICU is now "incorporated" in Seagate:

http://www.seagate.com/services-software/data-recovery-services/

http://www.seagate.com/services-software/data-recovery-services/consumers/in-lab-data-recovery/

The other "big name" is Kroll-Ontrack:

http://www.krollontrack.com/

There are tens or hundreds of independent professional firms that do this kind of business.

A few words of advice are needed.

It is extremely difficult to understand if any of these companies is made of actual professionals (or however people that know where their towel is).

The risk with a not-known company is that the guy that is going to actually open the hard disk will be using under-standard tools and actually know very little on how to deal with a serious disk issues (but on the other hand "independent" data recovery companies happened to recover disks that "mainstream" ones gave for dead).

The risk with a "very large company" is that your disk will go in the hands of an underpaid "trained monkey", using the best tools of the world but lacking the dirve (if you pardon me the pun) to actually solve the issue of customer #12345678 if it is anything outside common standard procedures.

You will need to make contacts with a few of them and follow your instinct , there are companies that will make - upon free examination of the disk drive - a detailed diagnosis and quote for the specific recovery attempt, other that will charge you anyway a flat examination fee, and some that will provide you with a flat rate for the recovery attempt without even having a look at the disk.

It is not unlikely that you will find people quoting anything between US$ 300.00 and US$ 3,000.00 and unfortunately you have no way to know if the first number is a good deal and the second is a rip-off or if the first is nonsense and the second is adequate.

A good way to know which kind of people they are is the presence of a "clean room" in their advertisement/site, then physically go to their firm and ask to see it (from the outside is OK).

AFAICT most "not major" firms do not have a clean room and use instead a laminar flow bench (which BTW is fine in itself), when a firm advertises the use of a "clean room" and all it has is instead a laminar flow hood, it should tell you something about their reliability.

jaclaz