Help with a Seagate ST31000333AS Drive

[Pokaholic]

Ok, I have done some research on the boards regarding this particular drive. From this research I have found what I hope is a glimmer of hope. Here is the scenario. I am a photographer and this drive is one of my storage drives. I store the majority of my photos on it, along with a few other random things. This data is of high importance to me. A good portion of this data has been backed up, or may even be on another drive (where is was originally before being moved). However there is also a decent portion that was put straight onto this drive and was not backed up, but I currently have no way of knowing what I might be missing from the drive.

That being said, here is what has happened. Today the drive was working fine. After powering it down and disconnecting it so I could check another drives content. I reattached the drive to my external drive reader and everything seemed normal, but the drive would not show up and bogged down the system. I attempted this a few times without any luck. At this point I attempted a different method of attaching it by using the power source of a different PC and connecting it via USB. The drive spins up, sounds like it's reading, then stops reading, but continues spinning. It even seemed to get recognized, supposedly installing drivers, but doesn't get recognized. Finally, I attached it directly to the MB via SATA cord, but no luck at all with this method. Like the other ways, it appears to initially read the drive, but stops and is not recognized.

Here's where my glimmer of hope comes in. During my research, I found that this drive apparently has had issues with the firmware. Does this sound like that might be the case here? I also read that seagate would take care of this for free, but it also stated the supposed affected drives were manufactured Jan 2009 or before. My drive has a date code of 09244, which I assume means 24 April, 2009.

Can anyone enlighten me on this a bit more?

[fzabkar]

The drive spins up, sounds like it's reading, then stops reading, but continues spinning.

Can you tell us the firmware version?

A date code of "09244" corresponds to 2008 December 16th.

See http://www.bugaco.com/calculators/seagate_date_code.php

The firmware update for the BSY bug is here:
http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/s ... 57&Hilite=

Frequently-Asked Questions related to firmware issues:
http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board/mes ... &jump=true

Here are repair procedures for Seagate 7200.11 drives:
http://sites.google.com/site/seagatefix/
http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=128807

Tutorial with photos:
http://www.overclock.net/hard-drives-st ... -pics.html

Pinout of Nokia CA-42 cable's Pop-port connector (use pins 6,7,8):
http://pinouts.ru/CellularPhones-Nokia/ ... nout.shtml

See the following technical bulletin:
http://atulchitnis.net/files/seagate.pdf

[Pokaholic]

Firmware: CC1H


I have done a little more research, and am fairly confident that it is in BSY mode. I would seriously be soooo relieved if I can get this working properly. I already have 2 other HD's sitting on a shelf waiting for me to be able to afford repairs.

[fzabkar]

Firmware: CC1H


I have done a little more research, and am fairly confident that it is in BSY mode. I would seriously be soooo relieved if I can get this working properly. I already have 2 other HD's sitting on a shelf waiting for me to be able to afford repairs.

Do not be tempted to "flash" your firmware. CC firmware and SD firmware are incompatible.

http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/s ... 57&Hilite=

"Note: If your drive has CC firmware, your drive is not affected and no further action is required. Attempting to flash the firmware of a drive with CC firmware will result in rendering your drive inoperable."

[Pokaholic]

I saw that, thanks.


In a further update: I was trying some of the seagate troubleshooting suggestions and here is what I found. When I tried to "manage" the drives, the drive in question did not show up. When I went into the bios, the drive in question was there, however, before I was able to go into the bios, I got a error message.

The message was: NOTE - Hard Drive SELF MONITORING SYSTEM has reported that a parameter has exceeded it's normal operating range. Dell recommends that you back up your data regularly. A parameter out of range may or may not indicate a potential HD problem.

I think my glimmer of hope just faded.

[fzabkar]

The message was: NOTE - Hard Drive SELF MONITORING SYSTEM has reported that a parameter has exceeded it's normal operating range

S.M.A.R.T. is telling you that something is wrong with the drive's hardware. A common culprit is an excessive number of bad sectors. If the drive is making horrible noises, then stop now because the heads may have crashed. Otherwise you may be able to use multipass cloning software such as dd_rescue:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_rescue# ... ants_of_dd

Here are two SMART utilities:

HD Sentinel (DOS / Windows / Linux):
http://www.hdsentinel.com/

HDDScan for Windows:
http://hddscan.com/

Look for reallocated or pending sectors.

See this article for more info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.

[craig6928]

yep bad sectors on your drive

seagate are well know for this total piece of crap


i had a brand new 500gb go down after a month
with the same problem as you.

turned out there was over 30,000 bad sectors
sent back to seagate who send me a recon hard drive out wtf

[harddrivespecialist]

Most likely one of the heads is failing...
Don't do anything more to your drive if your want your data back.
Don't even try to power it on.

[Pokaholic]

S.M.A.R.T. is telling you that something is wrong with the drive's hardware. A common culprit is an excessive number of bad sectors. If the drive is making horrible noises, then stop now because the heads may have crashed.

Well, preceding the crash, and afterward it has not been making any horrible noises.

Most likely one of the heads is failing...
Don't do anything more to your drive if your want your data back.
Don't even try to power it on.

After my last post last night I pretty much decided that the drive was dead, disconnected it and put it on the shelf with the other two dead drives that need repair.

This morning however I did attach it one last time to make sure of what I was hearing, and it no longer sounds to me as though it's attempting to read the drive so much. It sounds as though the head(s) is trying to do something, but then just stops(though the drive still spins). I simply powered it down and put it on the shelf.


So now I am at the point where I have 3 failed hard drives, and limited funds. I could certainly purchase a new drive to replace the one that just died, BUT I somewhat need to have the images on that drive, along with the files that correspond to them from Adobe lightroom, among other things.

I guess what I am saying is that I want estimates on the costs to repair these drives. If you are interested in doing the work please PM me and I will give details on everything.