Seagate 1TB harddrive beeping!

[cat 325ccr]

Everthing was going fine until I dropped my Seagate hard drive no more than a foot on a hardwood floor. I put it into my computer and it worked, keep in mind that I already dropped it and it was working after. Then I went onto it a few hours later and when I plugged it in the lights on the Seagate drive were blinking, I knew something wasn't right about that so i unplugged it and then plugged it in again and it didn't do anything for acouple of secs and then i put the drive up to my ear and i heard beeping, everyother second it would beep. I researched it and it doesn't say much about fixing it, just says the problem, which is not the Hard drive it self (stored memory on it) so if you could help me, please do!!!

[cat 325ccr]

Well it seems that all my data is lost all 700 Giga Bites of pics and video from the past year

[Kap]

I have a Seagate drive like yours and the data is still there.

The problem is the read write heads can't access it, this is probably due to when you dropped it.

The good news is the data probably every byte is obtainable. The bad news is it's going to cost you to have disks scanned and info put onto another drive or media of your choice.

There are many places that can do this for you if the data is that important. I have no idea on the cost.

Hope this helps.

[cat 325ccr]

Thanks for the info!

I checked on Seagate's website for data recovery and they want from 800.00 to 5,000.00 USD for it!!!

I guess I could do without it, still sucks though

[Kap]

Vinny, your cost would probably be at the low end maybe $800 or so is the data worth it ? $5000 would be if the drive was in a fire or disks were bent or cracked.

In the future you might want to do what I do. I have a 1TB internal drive which is backed up by an external 1TB drive this way the external drive has it's own power supply and does not rely on the computer. The back-up drive I use cost more than most but will accept USB2.0, Firewirewire 400 & 800 and eSATA
connections your choice.

The drive is made my G-Drive a 1-TB drive is selling for $189.00
and is built like a tank I've had mine for two years now and works great.

Most people don't back up their stuff but it really pays to.

For photos, I back them up on an external drive and I burn them to DVD's just incase the back-up drive fails.......nothing is perfect.

lastly, if you have some really important stuff like company records, photos, etc. I use a USB Flash drive and or DVD's and then I store off site.

This way I have a copy no matter what happens.

Kap

[stock]

Hmmmm I am no 'buter geek but had a similar issue with a Verbatim drive and it was the power board that was wrong. I gave it to a friend who had a universal lead for hard drives and he recovered the Data for 50 bucks........might be worth a look..

[cat 325ccr]

I just returned it to BEstBuy and got 2 HP 1TB's

[AU.CASE]

Everthing was going fine until I dropped my Seagate hard drive no more than a foot on a hardwood floor.

Hi all,

That is a pretty stern test for a hard disk, even in a caddy!

Get one of these little beauties to backup your networked pc's.

I bought two through a sell of here in Oz at half price, one is a master backup of our office lan, the other synchronises the backup from the master, so double just in case, every 24 hours.

Easy to get going too.

Basic Seagate drives can tolerate these forces:

Seagate Shock (Gs) Operating: 2 ms 63 Nonoperating: 2 ms 300

A drop of a foot onto a hard surface would easily exceed those ratings.

Cheers!

[HEO Girl]

I had a couple hard drives fail on me, one was hardware failure and one was software failure. I took it to my local computer shop each time. With the hardware failure there wasn't much they could do, but it is worth a shot because they say sometimes they can get some stuff and they are waaaaaaaay cheaper then the seagate website. Next time that happens maybe try that before trashing it. I back up everything I have on my external hard drive and really important things to my usb flash drives

[AusDave]

I have an Apple Mac which makes backups a lot easier. For the last few years the Mac OS has had an Application called Time Machine. All you do is plug an external Hard Drive in and say yes when the computer asks if you want to make it your Time Machine backup. From then on your machine is backed up incrementally every hour the machine is turned on without you doing anything or noticing anything

Not only is it a full backup system that can rebuild your entire computer's Hard Drive to within the last hour it failed, it can also go back in time, depending on the size of your backup drive, to recover previously trashed files or files you may have corrupted recently. Definitely the ducks nuts, it just works and has saved many of my IT customers from disaster.

However even with this backup solution I have another backup of my entire computer on another Hard Drive which I keep in my car. That way if my house burns or my computer and backup Drive are stolen, (happened to one of my customers), I still have most of my data.

Many people have all of their business data, accounts, photos and more on their computer, imagine if it was all gone in a second... That's all it takes for a Hard Drive to fail. Backups are the cheapest insurance you'll ever get. I have witnessed the utter misery of some of my IT clients when they lost their accounts, booking data, client records, family photos and more in a Hard Drive failure, I don't want to experience that and nor should you. Hard Drives are mechanical devices, they wear out. It's not a matter of if but when!
Backup, backup backup, backup backup, backup backup, backup backup, backup backup, backup backup, backup backup, backup backup, backup backup, backup backup, backup backup, backup backup, backup backup, backup backup, backup backup, backup backup, backup...

AusDave

[AU.CASE]

Hard Drives are mechanical devices, they wear out. It's not a matter of if but when!
Backup, backup backup, backup backup, backup backup, backup backup, backup backup, backup backup, backup backup, backup backup, backup backup, backup backup, backup backup, backup backup, backup backup, backup backup, backup backup, backup backup, backup...

AusDave

Absolutely right.

I like your backup program too.

Sounds a bit crazy but I am considering a WiFi link to a shed with power on the property here, about 300m away for another redundancy backup to catch all the data from one of the servers' here, you just never know when it will be handy as its quite a high risk fire area here.

[AusDave]

Absolutely right.

I like your backup program too.

Sounds a bit crazy but I am considering a WiFi link to a shed with power on the property here, about 300m away for another redundancy backup to catch all the data from one of the servers' here, you just never know when it will be handy as its quite a high risk fire area here.

How about an earth covered bunker? That will really make your backup secure in a high fire risk area

But you are correct, location separated backups giving multiple levels of redundancy is a great idea. WiFi and Ethernet cable is quite cheap so go for it!

AusDave

[Vantage_TeS]

Or just don't drop them?

I've gone over to the dark side (solid states) already

[shanedan]

A tip I have seen work a bit but its a last resort,
seal te drive in a plastic sandwich bag or similar.. put it in the freezer for a couple of hours and then attach to a computer and copy as fast as you can!
The freezing causes the metal to contract and allow the heads to become free from the platters, a common problem with toasted drives.
As the drive warms up it will fail again and probably fail harder but it might buy you enough time to copy some of the important stuff off the drive, but only after everything else fails try this

[Kap]

Ahhhmmm..... I wouldn't try that.

A brand new drive can work at that temp but you are way cooler than what the factory recommends for drive temp. If it does work it will shorten the life of everything in the drive and possibly ruin it really good.

If your information is critical and you must have the info back, remove the drive and send it to someone of your choice to retrieve the info. The more you mess with it the less likely the info can be extracted and put onto another drive.

If you don't care about the drive at all you can put it in the freezer and bake it too then repeat the process !