I have a built PC that I run Leopard and XP on. Other day I installed Leopard on a brand new Seagate 1TB SATA drive to replace the old IDE one. The next day i booted up and my secondary/slave 1TB Maxtor wouldn't load.

In BIOS it's detected but shows "0" for all the info. In Leopard a message pops up saying it is unable to load the HD and in disc utility it is detected but all the options are unavailable to verify the disc. In XP it is detected under device manager, but not as a drive to browse.

I tried Seagate tools and it gives erros, also tried Disk Warrior but it says no SMART is available so it can't run the tests to recover the data.

Tried different SATA connections and tried with only one HD with no luck.

I notice there have been a problem with recent 1TB Seagate Barracudas and Maxtor DiamondMax but i called support and they said mine wasn't one of the ones affected.

The drive is a DiamondMax 22 1TB STM31000340AS S/N 5QJOE86N

I have a lot of important stuff that i need to recover. Any help is appreciated. thanks



LP

DO NOT EVER run Diskwarrior on a questionable drive. Not only is it about the worst file system tool out there for the Mac, but it is frequently too stupid to either give up when there is physical damage or to not try fix one error if another thing is not fixable. Filesystem repair tools are a very bad thing if something is physically wrong, and in fact, I really wish they would do a quick media test before simply pronouncing any area that looks wrong to be corrupted and graciously offering to "fix" it. For your filesystem needs, Tech Tool from Micromat is much better, and the Drive Genius by Prosoft is better still.

This goes for all platforms, do a simple physical media test, like MHDD scan, before using off the shelf logical repair tools. I've seen Disk Warrior royally f**k a drive's file system, when there was very little or nothing wrong with it. IMHO it's worse than chkdsk.

Where can i obtain MHDD? there site.. http://mhdd.com/ doesn't seem to be up. thanks for the tips. Any other suggestions?

I contacted a data recovery place and they said the more i try to obtain my data the more damage is done? is that true?

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That really depends. If the head or disc is damaged, then yes, it will get worse and worse. Physical damage is caused by head/media contact, which is generally caused caused by a few things: the head slider hits debris (dust etc) that is in the drive (shouldn't happen unless something broke off, you took the drive apart, or because of prior internal failure caused by something else), by a failure of the air bearing that the head flies on due to insufficient air pressure or impact, or because of a spindle bearing failure causing movement of the platter relative to the head.

Essentially, what happens where debris is concerned, is that the head (and please don't point out that I am using "head" to refer to both the head and the slider, it really is irrelevant) hits debris and either bounces, causing it to slap the disc, damaging either or both, possibly causing debris to be created (see above), or it can create enough heat to actually burn the head and/or disc. Debris can also be ground into the platter or ground up into smaller debris and spread further by this contact (again, see above, and then multiply exponentially!).

The result of a physical impact is much the same. Head hits disc, head and/or disc burns or is abraised, debris is generated, then proceed as above.

Now, if there is no damage, and you have a corrupted SA, a dead head preamp, or some other electric failure, there's no danger leaving the drive running as long as there it no physical damage (SA problems CAN be caused by physical damage).

Either way, if MHDD scans your drive, you have a logical problem. In that case, the worry is that any writing you do to a logically damaged drive can make it worse. It's best to use a tool that allows you to image that drive without modifying it, then work from a copy of that image (if you screw it up, you can always make another copy). Obviously copying an image takes a lot of space, but it's important if there is a possibility you won't be able to make another image.

This series of drives IS known to be problematic across the board even if Seagate won't acknowledge issues with your particular version of it, and you may have recourse with Seagate, possibly their recovery program will be extended to more versions of that drive, though they haven't been very good about recovering the ones that are acknowledged to be defective.

This drive is built upon the Seagate 7200.11 architecture which has been discussed on this forum ad nauseum. If your drive is recognized as 0 capacity, then you have a common problem which can now be solved very simply by dozens of data recovery providers. Pricing will vary widely from one provider to another so it's best to check with a few. Just ask them if they're familiar with the translator issue in 7200.11's. If they say "what translator issue?" then move on to the next guy. We're in NJ if that's any help, but I'm sure there are closer providers who can deal with the problem.

try this.. for free... 100% data back..don't listen to this DR sharks...do it on your own...
tutorial-resolve-lba-seagate-7200-bios-don-recognize-t11040.html
you have 0LBA issue.

I'm sorry, would those be the same DR sharks that you joined this forum to ask for free help getting your drive unlocked?

There's a saying... don't shit where you eat.

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

Do it on your own then throw it in the garbage.

I do still firmly believe the 7K1000 is a much better product. Not quite as fast, definitely more reliable.

* * *

I've been working with Macs since 1987.

The key is to use these tools on the clone or image, not a failed or failing drive.

I disagree. IMHO, Disk Warrior is a great tool. Unlike chkdsk, it will tell you if there are hardware problems with the drive so you can stop it. You can preview the directory changes before you write to disk.

I find that Disk Warrior works a lot more often than Drive Genius.

I've never gotten much out of Tech Tool and we don't use it, except perhaps for RAM testing.

We use other tools for partition repair when Disk Warrior can't see or repair a drive.

But hey. To each his own.

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Sorry this sarks need to be in "" like this "sharks". Not trying to insolt enybody, i apologuise deaple to this "sharks" they help me so much.

Disk Warrior does work more often than Drive Genius, to cover up a problem. You can do things to make the error go away and hope it holds together, but it's not a good solution. Drive Genius actually does work as advertised, and actually does do physical checks on the disk where there are errors. Disk Warrior doesn't do that, and it's been acknowledged by its authors that it may misinterpret an error reading as something being corrupted, then merely attempt to to its standard repair on it, resulting in often further corruption to the filesystem data. Their solution is to run a surface test first it you think there may be a physical problem. Tell me, how many people are going to do that? As far as Techtool, the Pro variant of version 4 and up has a very decent drive utility suite.

Having used Macs since 1987 means less than nothing, as far as OS X is concerned. It's a totally different system, and the filing system has been so patched up with duct tape and Gorilla Glue that it's a wonder more data isn't lost. I used to have an A/UX machine. Doesn't give me any credibility, it's still not X, nothing like it in fact, other than they are both flavors or derivatives of UNIX.

Sure, you can tweak something around until it works right, but the underlying problem is that HFS+ is a horrid filesystem. I'm not coming at this as a Windows nut, either, neither one is my preferred platform, though NTFS is a much better file system.. It's needlessly complicated, not intelligently redundant, and what journaling it has is an afterthought. There are simply too many places for it to break, and if it isn't fixed correctly at all of the places, it will get worse. HFS+ is not at all tolerant of internal faults.

Either way, once you have any serious logical problem (enough to cause a problem that shows up in operation, not just when checking the disk) on an Apple HFS+ volume, copy all your information off and reformat it. Better yet, use Apple's UNIX file system, and I believe they may be starting with full standard ZFS compatibility, which is good.

Anyway, the main point of my earlier reply was to just remind that you don't want to run file system tools on something until after you make some physical diagnosis, and that Disk Warrior doesn't do that.