I've been having trouble with my hard drive for the past week, and I'm at my wits end at this point.
My PC froze while playing gmod, so, after it failing to open the ctrl-alt-del menu for a few minutes, I decided to restart it, as I've done in the past.
However, when I started it back up, my HDD was not recognized. I couldn't find it in the BIOS, nor can I find it in This PC.
I can still boot from my SSD, thankfully, and I found that my HDD was an unknown device in the device manager, so I tried to install HDD drivers on it, which did nothing more than move it to the Disk Drive tab where my SSD is.
Interestingly enough, putting my PC to sleep and waking it back up causes my PC to suddenly recognize the HDD, but trying to open it or fiddle with the desktop/taskbar/windows explorer in general causes my PC to freeze.
I have an external HDD dock, so I tried that out, but whenever I plug it in, the drives' folders open up for a bit, then quickly disappear. I was able to snatch a few files in the tiny amount of time I had, so I know that the HDD still has the files, but I can't get it to not disappear immediately.
I've tried swapping SATA cables between the SSD and the HDD, a new SATA cable, unplugging, booting on and off, replugging, and booting back up, but nothing has worked so far.
I've tried finding it in Disk Manager, but it tells me that I need to initalize the disk, but I've tried both MBR and GPT partition styles, and I get errors for both. Either way, I'd like to avoid wiping it if I can.
Any ideas?
Could be a dying drive. Do you have another computer you could try using it with? If it shows the exact same signs on a different computer, I'd say it's dead/dying for sure.
How old is the hard drive? Brand/series? How often do you defrag it?
It's a 2TB seagate barracuda, around 3 years old at this point, and I could try hooking it up to a separate computer. I haven't manually defragged it in a long time.
Ouch. I'm 90% sure it's a dead drive, Seagate themselves say the life expectancy of the Barracuda is 2 years, while others say less than a year.
(Seagate drives in general aren't very reliable)
Do try hooking it up to a separate computer before giving up, you never know, but you'll most likely get the same results.
Turns out I can't hook the hard drive up to the other computer; it uses cables that hook up directly to the hard drive.
Interestingly enough, I just found that if I hook up the external dock and try to extract files, it'll stay connected during the transfer, but disappear immediately after. The files are fine, too.
[QUOTE=DeadCow;48968812]Ouch. I'm 90% sure it's a dead drive, Seagate themselves say the life expectancy of the Barracuda is 2 years, while others say less than a year.
(Seagate drives in general aren't very reliable)
Do try hooking it up to a separate computer before giving up, you never know, but you'll most likely get the same results.[/QUOTE]
Bullshit.
OP: they had a firmware issue which caused the drive to fail at startup after a certain ammount of times. (It will still work sometimes).
If this is the case, seagate will update the firmware free of charge while keeping your data. There is a list of serial numbers affected by this firmware bug on their site.
[QUOTE=taipan;48972430]Bullshit.
OP: they had a firmware issue which caused the drive to fail at startup after a certain ammount of times. (It will still work sometimes).
If this is the case, seagate will update the firmware free of charge while keeping your data. There is a list of serial numbers affected by this firmware bug on their site.[/QUOTE]
Couldn't find the free update service, but I have found an update for my HDD (ST2000DM001)
I'm going to install it; Fingers crossed!
[QUOTE=taipan;48972430]Bullshit.
[/QUOTE]
Thanks
I have never had a good experience with a Seagate drive, just saying.
OP, I wish you the best of luck
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