Seagate hard drive failure on HP Pavilion

[Colibri]

Last November I bought an HP Pavilion desktop with a 500GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 hard drive in the US. (I live in Panama). Last Thursday, after a period of inactivity, I found it with a black screen and a “Hard Disk Boot Failure” message. Attempting to boot with a Vista recovery disk failed.

I took it to a local computer repair shop. They said the BIOS was not recognizing the disk drive. They also said the Seagate evidently is known to have a firmware problem that causes failure. A little checking around in the internet shows there is a faulty microcode that causes the drive to “brick up.” Once the drive has failed it is impossible to recover the data without specialized techniques costing hundreds of dollars.

Fortunately, I have my most important files backed up on an external hard drive and my laptop. However, there are some files that I was negligent in backing up that I would like to have off the drive, if it might be possible to do so without a major investment.

Anyone know anything about this problem? A quick search on the HP support site didn’t turn up any information at all.

[astro]

If the drive is not just intermittently faulty but completely inaccessible you’re pretty much SOL without specialized equipment. I’ve never heard of a faulty BIOS microcode causing a problem over time. It’s pretty much a binary scenario in that it works or it doesn’t. A BIOS is not going to (so far as I know) cause a drive to fail over time. I really don’t even see how that could happen.

If the drive is still being sold in retail channels or on eBay you could (if it is indeed the BIOS and not defective platters) simply get a exact model replacement drive and using small Torx screwdrivers take off the controller board (not wildly difficult as construction is fairly modular) and use it on your drive. Bare 500 gig drives are $50-$80 at this point. This is far less than a data recovery service.

[Colibri]

I just found these instructions for fixing the drive. Unfortunately, this sort of thing isn’t really within my technical capability.

[astro]

@Colibri

I just found these instructions for fixing the drive. Unfortunately, this sort of thing isn’t really within my technical capability.

Interesting, he’s jury rigging a low level access to the drive. What I’m a bit puzzled by is the instructions here which seem to indicate that he’s generating a new primary partition. This will normally blow out access to the existing data.

Replacing the controller board will (I believe) accomplish the same thing without the hot wiring gymnastics.

After 15-30 seconds, you should see something like:

Max Wr Retries = 00, Max Rd Retries = 00, Max ECC T-Level = 14, Max Certify Rewrite Retries = 00C8

User Partition Format 10% complete, Zone 00, Pass 00, LBA 00004339, ErrCode 00000080, Elapsed Time 0 mins 05 secs

User Partition Format Successful - Elapsed Time 0 mins 05 secs

Do not turn off drive until you see this message.
Once seen, drive can be turned off.
Power down everything, place drive back into your computer, and confirm that it’s working

[Quartz]

I’ll second replacing the controller board.

[Colibri]

I have done a bit more searching. Several posts on forums dealing with this problem assert that changing the controller board is not an option.

Here:

Most of the firmware on these drives is actually stored on the disks (platters) in the SA (service area). Sending off your controller board is not an option when it comes to repairing these unfortunately.

I have no idea how reliable this information is, but I think that if it were a solution it would be turning up more on Google.

This site describes the problem in more detail:

The drive will power up normally (no ticking noises, errors etc) but will not be recognised by the computer
The drive will power up normally and be recognised correctly but will report a size of 0 bytes
The drive will power up but report SMART errors on boot
Cause: The fault stems from a firmware issue that set an invalid boundary value for the drive’s ‘circular event log’. Where this coincides with a particular test pattern being placed in the system tracks of the reserved area by some of Seagate’s post manufacture ‘tester’ applications, the event log pointer is incremented beyond its allowable boundary. This is detected as an ‘Assert Failure’ by the drive which ‘freezes’ as a self-protection response. Once this occurs the drive is remains inoperable however many times it is subsequently powered up. The unpredictable nature of the problem means that it is near impossible to say whether or when drives with the firmware in question will fail.

The first symptom is the way my computer is reacting.

[brujaja]

You might try going to majorgeek’s data recovery page and seeing what you can find there. Most of the programs are for simple undelete, so scroll all the way down, & look at everything.

I have had success on Seagate drives with programs found here; the ones I’ve used would require you to set up another drive as master, & the problem drive as a slave. Make sure you have access to a jumper setting diagram – usually, they’re printed right on the hard drive. You would need to change the jumpers on both drives, and, well, I don’t know how it works with the cables for an external drive, since they’re usb.