hard drive recovery   |   raid recovery   |   laptop recovery   |   about us   |   Site Map

 
  Support Center: 0207 112 1770  
 
  Data Recovery AddressAddress: 88 Kingsway, Holborn, London, WC2B 6AA

Seagate ST3120022A Data Recovery Details


seagate

Seagate drives fail and the ST3120022A is no exception to this.

Seagate Desktop Hard Drive Seagate Notebook Hard Drive Seagate Laptop Hard Drive Seagate Desktop Hard Drive

Seagate ST3120022A drive was working perfectly and does not seem to have any errors on it at all - except for all of a sudden the drive shows up as 0 bytes capacity. When you go into the Windows 2003 Server storage manager it shows that the 80gb drive has about 40gb used - but the partition type is RAW. ..Paul Duffy, Middlesbrough, UK

Seagate is the world's largest and oldest manufacturer of computer hard disks. The company has been going from strength to strength with its $1.9 billion acquisition of rival hard drive firm Maxtor in 2006. Segates flagship desktop Barracuda 7200.11 drives, in particular the 1TB - ST31000340AS units, are failing at an alarming rate and prompting outrage from their faithful clients. A new self-bricking feature apparently resides in faulty firmware microcode which will rear its ugly head sometime at boot detection. Essentially the drive will be working as normal for a while, then - out of the blue - it’ll brick itself to death. The next time you reboot your computer the drive will simply lock itself up as a failsafe and won’t be detected by the BIOS. In other words, there’s power, spin-up, but no detection to enable booting. We have the fix for this issues without the need to open the drives up. Common Seagate Hard Disk issues include, Seagate Momentus - can suffer premature media damage; Seagate U series - can suffer motor damage; Seagate Cheetah - Firmware corruption is No1 issue; Seagate Barracuda - Suffer from firmware, motor and read/write head issues.

My drive Seagate just died. My computer hard drive makes a musical like sound. Like a melody from a mobile phone. ...Pete Quinn Lincolnshire UK

Seagate hard drives are vunerable to a power surge or spike. As is the case with other hard disk's Seagate drives controller board is usually the weak spot that will fail. The controller board of most drives stores unique adaptive data that can only be associated with the drive that it was originally a part of. In other words, it's very seldom that you can just swap out a controller board from one drive to another and get the dead drive functioning again. In more cases than not the spindle motor controller driver (SMOOTH chip) on the logic board gets burnt. If this occurs the computer would shutdown completely, you would also normally notice a burning smell and when powered on the drive will not spin up at all.

If a drive is not spinning at all this can mean that there is a seized motor or indicates possible platter damage. Data recovery in this case involves opening the hard disk in a clean facility to work on the drive internally.

 

The drive fell of a table when switched on. It no longer spins or powers up when connected to my computer. It's ST3120022A.
..G Millar, Somerset, UK

The last typical Seagate hard drive issue applies also to all other hard drive makes and models, the problem is called bad sectors. After some period of time the platters were the data is located starts to degrade and bad sectors appear.
Whenever the hard drive attempts to read bad sectors it could start freezing, scratching, ticking and sometimes loud clicking. This leads to further damage to the surface and causes more data loss. As soon as you start experiencing such symptoms while reading important files, stop the drive immediately and consider sending it to a data recovery company like ourselves for a free diagnostic. Any further attempts to read the Seagate drive would just add up to the problems and make more data unrecoverable. In our Data Recovery Lab we use expensive imaging tools that are capable of force reading bad sectors from Seagate Hard Disks. This is usually the only way to effectively retrieve data from these Drives.

If you experience any of the symptoms described above with your Seagate ST3120022A please call us on 0207 112 1770.

If you hear your Seagate ST3120022A hard drive making some other unusual noises please call us on 0207 112 1770.