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Seagate ST340016 Data Recovery Details
Seagate drives fail and the ST340016 is no exception to this.
   
The drive stopped responding. It spins on startup then comes back with error, no drive found. On the label it reads Seagate(ST340016 model). Tried to gain access to the data using an external case via usb but no good.
..T Lynch, Morton, 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 Seagate ST340016 seems to be spinning ok. Its a USB Hard Drive so when I connect the drive I get a constant bell sound and watching Device Manager shows a yellow ! with "USB Device" constantly appearing / disappearing... it will do this forever. All Flash drives work fine (I have several).
..John White, Falkirk, Scotland
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.
A power failure two nights ago took it off line. I noticed the next morning as I scanned my Windows Explorer that it was not listed along with my other 2 disks. The blue light was flashing, which has happed in same circumstances before. Following the Lacie recommendations, I took it off line (turned the blue button off, unplugged the drive and removed the USB cord). I then reinstalled the drive power cord 1st followed by USB cord to Disk then to CPU. I did not plug the USB cord into the same port of the computer as it was prreviously plugged into. Since then the blue light is still flashing and I have no access to all my Photography including my main portfolio. Any help would be greatly be appreciated. It's a Seagate, p/n: ST340016.
..M Davies, Durham, 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.
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 ST340016 please call us on 0207 112 1770. If you hear your Seagate ST340016 hard drive making some other unusual noises please call us on 0207 112 1770.
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