PLEASE INSERT BOOT DISK

I lost my drive this morning.
I turned on my computer and got the no drive found error.
The good thing is that I finished setting up a mirror for all of my pictures (it took 4 days to synchronise.) My documents and stuff were not backed up, but most are duplicated on various computers, so it will just take time figuring out what I am missing.

In the mean time I am using a 4g CF flash card as a hd. I have a bunch of old IDE drives that I need to sort through and see what is on each, but I may just wait for my replacement drive to come in the mail.

The HD is not even a year old. It is a 500G seagate. Many buyers of this product claimed to have the drive fail in the first few months...Looks like seagate may have some QA issues. It also looks like they are benefiting off of it with their data recovery services.

Anyway, just thought I'd let everyone know to remember to do your backups. Also, it will be a while before I can play again.

BTW: I found UT3 on the clearance shelf at target for $12, so I bought it...even though I can't install it at the moment.

I would recommend that folks use the WD raptor series. I've yet to have one fail me and..............once registered with WD, 5 year warranty.

I had a 300 GB SATA Seagate that I got rid of because it would never hold data for long.

It's been the opposite experience for me. I had one WD drive that failed on me in the first two weeks. I've bought numerous Seagate drives since and none of them have had problems. I've been recommending them to family and friends as well, no failures yet.

I got my replacement drive installed...I also used this opportunity to get a new DVD drive (the old one was getting old and was having some read issues)

I got my windowsXP partition back up...it was quite painful, and it may be time to get vista (i think i can get it for <$20 with my student discount)
I had a problem with activation...I only installed windows a couple of months ago, and had to do it multiple tiimes due to driver issues...so I raised a flag...Their automated system now asks twenty questions about my previous installs, then transfers you to person who then asks the same twenty questions.
I got UT2004 installed, with the patches. I also installed UT3.
unfortunately I didn't backup my keybinds, so it will take me some time to rebuild them...in the mean time I think I am really liking UT3 so far...although I haven't played online yet.
(It is really tough picking a user name that hasn't already been picked)

I know you all might laugh but it has worked for me in the past with this sort of problem.

BTW, This is something you should only try as a last stitch effort.

Take the HDD out
put HDD in a ziplock bag
Place in freezer over night

(This part works best with an external enclosure)
When your ready remove hdd from freezer (and Bag) and hookup before the drive has a chance to heat up.

I've had about a 30% success from using this method

We have worked with both WD and Seagate over the years at places I have worked, and Seagate drives have been far better than WD drives. Where I work now, we have over 2000 drives in just one of our data centers (we probably are close to 3000 drives between our data center and two other computer rooms), and WD drives represent about 2% of our drives, but around 90% of our drive failures, while the Seagate drives are all first generation drives for their size (first generation of any drive family or size is generally to be avoided). And our usage pattern is far harsher than what a drive would encounter in a home system... we do research in data storage, and will run drives at near maximum throughput for days at a time, and average above a 60% duty cycle on the drives across a year.

Gonna be even more interesting in the coming months. We just expanded our uplink to the I2 to a bandwidth which most places only see inside a data center, and are adding several hundred more servers. We will probably be at over 1.5PB, and perhaps even over 2PB of total storage by .the second half of Summer semester.

BTW... 5 year warranties are to be had on the Seagate Barracuda drives, if you are careful not to get a OEM version drive. It is all I ever buy anymore, having also seen WD drives fail far more often than Seagate drives.

Oh... and one last thing. Beware using CF or similar media for drives where you are constantly writing and re-writing. Even with wear leveling, etc., they are only good for about 10K writes per page, and then they will fail. We have researchers who have managed to have SSDs fail in what would be about a year's normal usage for a non-casual user.

Ratar_Killer wrote:

I know you all might laugh but it has worked for me in the past with this sort of problem.

BTW, This is something you should only try as a last stitch effort.

Take the HDD out
put HDD in a ziplock bag
Place in freezer over night

(This part works best with an external enclosure)
When your ready remove hdd from freezer (and Bag) and hookup before the drive has a chance to heat up.

I've had about a 30% success from using this method

That method wont work in this case...The drive isn't recognized by any sata controllers.
I have a maxtor drive that failed 4 years ago. While the drive is cool, i can recover a couple of megs of useful data at a time. after a couple of hours the drive gets too warm and I have to wait a couple of hours for it to cool down. I think I will make a heat sink for it sometime.

Spacey wrote:

BTW... 5 year warranties are to be had on the Seagate Barracuda drives, if you are careful not to get a OEM version drive. It is all I ever buy anymore, having also seen WD drives fail far more often than Seagate drives.

Oh... and one last thing. Beware using CF or similar media for drives where you are constantly writing and re-writing. Even with wear leveling, etc., they are only good for about 10K writes per page, and then they will fail. We have researchers who have managed to have SSDs fail in what would be about a year's normal usage for a non-casual user.

Seagate's site says the OEM warranty is still 5 years.
Is there a problem with OEM warranty replacements?

The CF drive was just a temporary thing until I had time to get a replacement drive.
I have a MSI windpc for a personal server using a CF drive for the os. The CF drive is mirrored to the HD every couple of days just in case.
Only 1G of 4G is used. The only writes to the drive are updates, which happen once a month, and log entries which are <4M. There should be plenty room for wear leveling. On the other hand, I am using a 500M swap space on the drive....there could be a problem there, but I can reduce the swapiness to limit the number of writes to swap.

I just found out that the issue is due to a bug in the firmware that can cause the drive to fail when powered down.
If you have a seagate drive go here to see if it is affected and download the fix:
http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207931&NewLang=en
It seems to affect drives made in 08
(If only I found out about this sooner

)

greg11 wrote:

I just found out that the issue is due to a bug in the firmware that can cause the drive to fail when powered down.
If you have a seagate drive go here to see if it is affected and download the fix:
http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207931&NewLang=en
It seems to affect drives made in 08
(If only I found out about this sooner )

Ah... first I heard about the 500GB drives suffering from that... we heard all about the 1TB drives from our friends inside Seagate, but not the 500GB drives.

As for the OEM warranties... many of those drives are setup with 3yr warranties instead of 5, or their warranties are through the OEM company (such as Dell).

I have found more information about the issue...There is a built in log that when it fills up it pops the oldest entry. The problem is related to it popping the wrong address, and the drive goes into a safety lockdown that leaves the drive in a busy state on next power cycle.
The data on the drive is fine.
I have come across a couple of sites that explain how to fix the drive by connecting the jumper block to a command terminal...and sending a command to reset the busy state...then the firmware update can then be applied.
I should have a cellphone usb data cable laying around at work that I can use to do this.
a google search of '0 lba' pulls up many sites with the instructions.

Well I finally fixed the drive. I am transferring all my files from it now.
I still need to update the firmware also, but afterwards it should be as good as new.

It was a fun experience with one hurdle after another.
First the data cable I was using was one I found in a parts bin at work. It was for an old LG phone. I couldn't find any pinouts for it, so I had to take it apart, identify the ic used, and trace the wiring.
The other problem is that the jumper block for this drive used micro jumpers. I couldn't find anything to connect to this, so I had to solder the connections to the drive.
My first attempt at connecting to this drive failed because of a small short between the RX and GND prevented me from sending any commands. I figured I traced the cable wrong and gave up. I thought I would have to find a different serial connection, but out of curiosity I connected the RX to the TX on the cable and got a echo response (yay the cable is good.) I then decided to wire the GND to the drive (wasn't part of the instructions, but I didn't want interference bricking my drive). This is when I noticed the short (which was caused by an earlier attempt to make a micro jumper connection, and was not easy to fix...I spend about 10 mins with a needle trying to saw it off.)
After all of that I got a connection to the debug connection of the drive.
I had to then disconnect the spindle motor. Then tell the drive to spin down. Connect the motor again. Then tell the drive to spin up. At this point I got a spin error. After almost quiting again, I checked all of the screws tight and tried again. This time it worked. After spinup, I had to reset SMART and enter some command that I don't know what exactly it does, but it has something to do with regenerating a special partition.
After that I hooked up my drive and everything works.
This is the guide I followed in case anyone else wants to fix their drive:http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?s=6b6765d6087a7a71dec33481a7c34847&showtopic=128807
Now I think I should be able to get back to playing on DC. I got UT3 in the meantime. I got bored with it pretty fast.

Looking forward to playing with yall again.

Sounds like a real adventure.

BTW... If you have any decent PC repair/upgrade places in your area, you should be able to walk in and get a few jumpers of the right size with no problem. Some places, you will get the jumpers for free, some places, you might pay a nickle a piece for them. For that matter, a note posted here with the pin-to-pin distance probably would have gotten you a few. I know I probably have at least a dozen of each size in a drawer someplace around here. I know at least one size (2.5mm), I had about 150-200 of them at one point.

Look forward to catching you on the server soon.

The jumper pins on this drive are unusually small. It was the most common complaint on newegg.

My new problem is that I decided to transfer everything from my recovered drive to my new drive before proceeding with the firmware update. I had to move my vista partition to the end of the drive to make a new logical partition to hold the backup. Well vista didn't like being moved, which is already a known issue, but what it also didn't like was me moving my old xp partition too. Now it is confused and has swapped the drive letters on the two partitions. Vista boots up but wont load my profile or let me use any system utilites. I am backing up my vista partition now, and I am going to wipe the xp partition (I don't think I need it anymore) and see where that gets me. If all else fails I can always reinstall. I only use it for gaming.

They may be unusually small, but I do have jumpers for them (I believe they might be the 1mm jumpers). The joys of being a computer engineer who works with this stuff all the time.

greg11 wrote:

I just found out that the issue is due to a bug in the firmware that can cause the drive to fail when powered down.
If you have a seagate drive go here to see if it is affected and download the fix:
http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207931&NewLang=en
It seems to affect drives made in 08
(If only I found out about this sooner )

yikes I seem to have this problem on my secondary CPU (my sons)
no simpler ways to accomplish this ?
dang I may just have to try to fix , or spend the $100 to buy a new HD
thanks for posting the link Greg