Hard Drive Failure

[Atty]

My second 320GB Seagate Drive went belly up the other day, I can't access the drive from within Windows and upon start up I get an error saying Master Drive 4 Error, press F1 to continue.

When I try to access the drive from Windows (Vista, 32bit) it tells me the Disk in Drive D: needs to be formatted before being used, then asks if I want to format or not.

Now, does anyone know any possible way to salvage any of the information off of that hard drive? There is a lot of stuff on there I'd like to save if possible, thanks!

 

[EarthwormJim]

You can try leaving it in the freezer overnight, worked for one drive I had go bad years ago. Be sure to put it in a ziplock bag to prevent condensation.

You can also try out Spinrite. I had a similar situation as you had with a hard drive, windows couldn't see the drive, and Spinrite fixed that. I was able to get all the data off of it.

Seagate has a freebie version of Acronis True Image. You can make a bootable disc with it and try seeing if it's file explorer will let you copy stuff off the disc.

 

[Atty]

Well I found a back up disk with everything I needed to save on it, so I just formatted it, but when I formatted it, it only says there is 32.0MB of space on it, when its a 320GB drive. Any help?

 

[EarthwormJim]

Originally posted by: iAtticus
Well I found a back up disk with everything I needed to save on it, so I just formatted it, but when I formatted it, it only says there is 32.0MB of space on it, when its a 320GB drive. Any help?

RMA the drive, it's bad. Hard drives don't just disappear from windows if they are functioning correctly

 

[Zbox]

So I've always been curious of throwing a hard drive in the freezer in an effort to salvage data. Two days ago a family member of mine had their home office hard drive take a dump. The drive wouldn't mount and I couldn't access the hard drive no matter what I tried.

I decided to throw the hard drive in a USB cage, insulate the entire thing, tossed it in an ESD bag, then threw it in our environment simulator at work with power and USB cables running out the side.

I let the drive sit at -20 C for about 10 minutes then plugged it in to a machine while keeping the drive cooled.

Magic. Both NTFS partitions showed up right away, and I was able to repair them both and recover just about all the data.

 

[Modelworks]

Whats going on with the freezer thing is your causing whatever loose connection it is to contract and make contact again.
What also works is removing the circuit board, cleaning the contacts and re-attaching the board.
They used to have mylar ribbon cable that connected to the boards but have switched to just putting the contacts on the board and having that line up with a connector for the drives internals. Problem is if the circuit board lifts any at all the connection is broken.

Heat also works for making a drive work again, but its a lot riskier than freezing the drive.

 

[cretinbob]

This is an old trick for when the grease kinda dries out and gets sticky. Back it up and RMA it.