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This is a technical post. Be afraid!
Woke up last weekend and realized that one of my Hard Disks (HDD) in my Media Center (home PC) is not visible anymore. A total of 500gb of data lost completely. Quite a shock to realize and accept the loss, but knowing my bad luck it was kind of an expected event.
It is a quite new HDD that I bought 6 months back, so there was a warranty. I researched the cause of the breakdown and below is what I found out (luck can not get worse):
- Well, it turned out that these HDD had a manufacturing problem and a firmware upgrade was posted on the manufacturer site back in February 2009 for fixing them. However the firmware should have been applied before the disk became 'NOT visible' in you PC. This is a very decent HDD, it is a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 500GB disk after all.
- I paid 124$ for this disk that is worth 60$ now (6 months later).
- It was a brand new generation of HDD back when I bought it over the internet and I had a friend of mine carry it from the US (Thanks Samer). So from a warranty point of view I am screwed as the only way to get a replacement back or a refund is to have it sent back to the US.
- Luckily enough I found a workaround posted on the internet BUT none of the needed ingredients are found here in Lebanon. And the workaround around this workaround to secure some needed ingredients would cost me more than the HDD itself. Yet I went for it!
So here we go. This link is the solution I found to make my HDD visible again so that I upgrade the firmware. In brief the solution consists of:
- Opening your HDD and removing the Circuit Board, then join them back while keeping the board disconnected from the HDD while connected to the spinning motor (using a paper separation slid in between).
- Next step was to use a USB-to-RS232 converter, connected to an RS232-to-TTL converter. Luckily enough these 2 converters can be found in a single cable provided by Nokia. This cable is quite expensive and rare to find as it is a 5 years old technology to connect to very old Nokia Phones.
- Now you cut the cable, identify the 5 internal wires (TX, RX, GND, Power GND and +VCC). TX,RX and GND connected to the HDD while the Power GND and +VCC connected to a +3V battery (I used my car keys battery. it was a 3V battery)
- Now you connect the USB to your laptop, install some drivers, open up a terminal and start sending few commands to the disk in order to reset its CMOS (some manipulation is also required).
A Messy solution, I know! An expensive one as well and yet I had no choice. Worse case I destroy an already useless HDD.
I worked on it for 2 full days with whatever ingredients I could gather and yet I was not able to recover my data. Nothing worked! Knowing the my bad luck it was kind of an expected thing for sure. I also had taken precautions and have some back up for some critical data.
So all in all, I lost around 480gb while I had a backup of 20gb of critical data that I regularly backed up previously. I ended up buying a new 1TB HDD (from a different manufacturer) and I have been running like crazy trying to gather all the 480gb that I lost and was able to find it at some friends of mine.
I can say I can fully recover all my data by this weekend. However, I am never buying a Seagate HDD ever again
Cheers
2 comments:
Being a fellow geek, I can understand the fun in wasting endless hours trying to revive a fried HDD :) However in my media server I opted for a (less fun, but more secure) 3-disk RAID-5 array using the built-in Intel RAID controller on my motherboard. Added bonus in that scenario is that in case the M/B goes belly up you can simply replace it with any recent motherboard using an Intel chipset and your data will all be there without having to do anything more than just plugging the new M/B in (and I've tested that scenario once already, when my previous M/B got fried).
I used to be able to afford a 3 disk Raid as well during bachelorhood. With a wife and kid I was gonna fix my 500gb before even thinking of investing an the 1TB.
So don't marry ;o)
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