Hard Drive Suddenly not Recognized

[szip]

My Dell was running fine until Sunday morning when I woke up to a blue screen on my computer stating that there was a disk error. Upon restarting, the computer would not boot windows. BIOS doesn't detect the hard drive (Seagate Barracuda 7200.10) in SATA-0. Therefore, I can't boot from CD because no hard drive is detected. Problem is not the motherboard because the BIOS recognize the DVD ROM when plugged into either SATA-0 or SATA-1. SATA cable is also good. Hard drive is spinning and getting power. I pulled the PCB off of the hard drive and it shows no signs of being burnt. Any idea what is going on here?

Thanks!
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[Your Amish Daddy]

What's the post code (Bluescreen text)

[szip]

I didn't write it down. The blue screen only showed up the one time...

[Thrax]

Why can you not boot from CD because no hard drive is detected? They're completely independent from one another.

[szip]

Well technically I can "boot" from the XP CD, but can't format or recover because the hard drive is not recognized.

[Thrax]

Given that the drive is spinning, receiving power, connects to a working motherboard, and is attached to a functioning cable, I'd say you have a dead PCB. You typically won't see any scorch marks. You can probably recover your data by buying an identical PCB and swapping in its PCB in lieu of the dead one.

[szip]

The computer is about a year and a half old so I probably won't be able to find the exact PCB. Do I just need to make sure that I match the Firmware number?

Thanks again!

[Thrax]

I should say: If you buy the same hard drive (say, on ebay), there's a pretty strong chance that the PCB will work just fine to revive your dead drive.

[szip]

Perfect. Thanks so much for the info.

[foolkiller]

Contact Seagate technical support. These is a firmware issue with some Seagate drives that cause them to just "die" like this, however the data is completely intact, and generally the drives and be reflashed with a specific hardware reset (RS-232 port.) While you will need to take this to a hard drive specialist to fix, as far as I know Seagate will do this for free if you call them and get the issue sorted out. At the very least, it's worth a try to call them.

[Your Amish Daddy]

I highly doubt this computer has the Seagate 1.5TB drive in it.

[Sonorous]

Well that wasn't very helpful YAD. Keep me posted on what your resolution to your issue is. If the swapping of the PCB is simple I have a few old drives I might be able to get working again. Good tip Thrax.

[Your Amish Daddy]

Well, if they're the same drive the PCB's will work. FK was talking about the new Seagate hard-drives that have the firmware bugs. I guess I'll end this here before I make someone mad.

[foolkiller]

If you look at the Seagate firmware list, some of their other drives other than the 1.5TB drives were also affected by the bad firmware. In any case, it's worth a shot to call them and see if they can offer any advice. They might have a service center nearby the person who can sell them a PCB, rather than hunting for an identical drive.

[foolkiller]

Also, the RS232 fix is for 500GB drives specifically, an older firmware had an issue of borking the drive because it would set something to a 1, if you reset it to a 0, it would work again. I'll look it up later, it's too early to go googling.

[Your Amish Daddy]

Oh yeah, I forgot about that one.

[Foohar]

You tried other SATA ports with you're drive?
Also you could use BART PE to burn an image to cd or USB drive and check if it fails to see it as well.

[szip]

Yeah, I tried other SATA ports with the drive and it stil wasn't recognized. I'll try the BART PE. Thanks.

[Thrax]

If the BIOS doesn't detect the hard drive, BartPE is not necessary.

[szip]

I bought as close to an identical drive as I could find (same model number, size, same PCB model number) and plugged it in. The BIOS recognized the Hard Drive so I know the problem wasn't the cable or mobo. I put the new PCB on the defective drive and it still wouldn't recognize it. Just to make sure the original problem WAS the PCB, I put the old PCB on the new drive and it would not recognize it either. The hard drives are near identical. The only difference is the Firmware. Could this cause the PCBs not to be interchangeable?