Seagate 160GB IDE drive suddenly invisible.

I.e., WITHOUT DRIVE your PC is not operating properly!

A few sentences ago, you claimed the PC doesn't get to BIOS with the "bad" drive disconnected. Now it *does* (with a different drive)? Are you sure your descriptions are consistent?

Sorry if the description wasn't clear. Let me try to list the chain of events.

1. Pc works fine with Seagate drive as master drive on first IDE channel.
2. Installed another hard drive to test as master on secondary channel.
3. Pc freezes while trying to list attached drives. Cannot access bios screen.
4. I remove the drive on the secondary channel.
5. At some point I think I was able to get into the bios menu after removing the test drive but at that point, it indicated no drive was present.
6. After a couple of more tries, I cannot get to the bios menu anymore.
7. I tried different jumper settings on the Seagate drive and clearing the CMOS. This didn't solve the problem.
8. Substituted another drive just to see if the Seagate drive was causing the problem. No problems with a different drive installed. Drive is recognized properly.

Thanks for your reply.

My own experience with Seagate drives has not been good!

A while back I bought 2x 400Gb drives from Maplin, it was a while before I unpacked them so there's no chance of returning them.

The one I have used so far worked OK for about a month then had a read access error while viewing a pdf, re-booting resulted in pretty much what you describe.

With a bit of persevering I got the PC to boot normally without the dodgy Seagate, then with a lot more I got it to start with the Seagate back on again - but it started in blue screen/CHKDSK mode and trashed a load of files before finally re-booting into Windows.

After copying the surviving data to another drive I ran Spinrite 6, on the first run (takes a whole day!) it marked a large number of allocation units as bad, on a second run there were no unrecoverable allocation units but the report indicated a massive total of seek errors!

ISTR a couple of decades ago Amstrad sued Seagate because their unreliable drives were giving the cheap crappy Amstrad PCs a bad name.

How I wish I'd not rushed to Maplin and bought the Seagates, a month later they had 500Gb Hitachi's for about the same price.

So, there was still a SEAGATE on channel 1 master (?). And, with *no* drive on channel 2, it CORRECTLY tells you "no drive present" (on channel *2*?).

Suggesting that the seagate on channel *1* is your problem? (or, something in the PC/PS)

This is the channel 1 seagate that you have now replaced, correct?

I.e., all of this seems to indicate the seagate channel 1 master is the issue (?)

Have you tried putting that drive on anywhere *else* WITH THE "different" (working) drive installed?

Note that some drives have different jumper settings for "master" and "master with slave present". The BIOS can "hang" for quite a while (almost a minute) looking for a slave that it *thinks* is there -- but isn't.

Yes, that is correct.

I tried the Seagate on another pc connected to the second channel. The pc hung trying to detect the drive. There was a working drive on the primary channel.

I waited for a while. Probably two minutes. No go.

Thanks for your reply.

On Thu, 13 May 2010 11:40:28 -0700, "David Farber" put finger to keyboard and composed:

If the drive spins up but is not detected, then the fault is most likely inside the HDA (head/disc assembly). However, I have seen cases where a bad IDE cable produces the same symptom. That said, if you decide to replace the circuit board, be prepared to transplant the serial EEPROM (flash) chip from patient to donor. On newer models this chip stores unique drive specific calibration data.

See the following article for help in identifying the components.

HDD from inside Main parts:

The following article explains why drives have "adaptive" data.

HDD from inside: Tracks and Zones. How hard it can be?

Essentially the reason is that no two heads are physically identical. HD manufacturers try to fit as much data as possible onto each platter. To do this, they take advantage of any head that performs better than the average.

For example, some heads will have a better frequency response than others, which means that you can cram more bits on each track. This technique is called Variable Bits Per Inch (VBPI).

Giant magnetorestive (GMR) heads use a separate element for writing and another for reading. The separation between these two components varies from head to head. Once again manufacturers optimise data density by implementing Variable Tracks Per Inch (VTPI).

Each HD therefore needs to be calibrated to account for VBPI and VTPI, otherwise the drive doesn't know where to find the tracks, or the data within the track. When a drive powers up, it needs to retrieve the bulk of its firmware from a reserved area (System Area) on the platters. If it can't read these data, then it clicks. This is what usually happens after you swap a board without transferring the calibration information.

- Franc Zabkar

How long ago? The drives will have a warranty with Maplin, but if the shop staff act like the stupid berks they normally are, you should be able to ship them back to Seagate. You can check warranty status on their web site.

Get a USB caddy to mount the drive in. Get Roadkills Rawcopy

Still not really clear... #1 above says the computer works OK with the Seagate drive. #7 says it doesn't work OK with the Seagate drive.

I'd think you have a bad cable, or you broke the drive.

BTW, you can't 'swap' the controller cards between drives, the NV ram on the controller is programmed to the drive itself.

Yes! Exactly. That would have prevented the problem completely which was...

I've slid so many test drives in out of the drive bay that occasionally the test slave drive doesn't go in exactly straight and clips the bottom of the Seagate drive. After closer inspection of the Seagate controller board, I found a capacitor hanging by one terminal, a zero ohm resistor which had a cold solder joint, and another capacitor missing from the board. There were just a couple of pc pads with only some leftover solder to show for it. All these parts are very small smd components and that's why I missed it on the first couple of go-rounds. Fortunately, I had another Seagate drive with the same controller layout. I used it to supply the missing capacitor. Soldering was not easy at all as I tried to hold the part in place with a tiny screwdriver. The magnetic field from the drive must have transferred to the capacitor (or my tools have been around too many speaker magnets) because the screwdriver was totally useless in aligning it to the board. I wound up using a wood stick from a broken off Q-tip to hold it in place.

Anyway, the drive boots fine now. Next step is to backup the drive. I get so involved in backing up and restoring other people's data I've neglected doing the same for myself.

Thanks for your reply.

Good call about the "broken" drive. I broke it moving it around. See my post a little way down the list.

Thanks for your reply.

Great info Franc. However I'm glad I didn't open the drive. That certainly would have ruined it for good.

As it turns out, the drive suffered a "clipping" problem. See my post a few messages after this one in response to Chris Oates.

Thanks for your reply.

Oh it's clear to me. the first drive is the master to start with, second one as a slave which he in stalled. The slave connects with the master.. There is something seriously wrong with the slave, it has destroyed or rewritten some vital parameters on the master drive. The controller on the master needs to be corrected.. Also, a true electrical failure may existed on the failed drive that has now shorted the once working drive, which was the primary (master)..

When testing drives, its always a good idea to boot from a external device to get your test PC running. Put the test drive in as a master. Don't have any other drives connected to that channel..

An amazing diagnostic and repair... I'm impressed you were able to recover.

WHEW what a read. Put a known good drive on the dead drive cable. If CMOS enumerates it then the drive electronics are hosed and you can either toss it, try to find an exact working drive and swap the control board or send it off to a recovery service if it has data on it you can't do without.

More than a year had passed by the time I unpacked the first one, might have been more than 2.

Do you mean what a good read or what a bad read? Do I have a career in store as a technical writer? lol. Anyway, you were right about the electronics. See my post from yesterday. A few of the smd parts on the pc board got knocked off from sliding test drives into the tight fitting drive bay underneath it. I happened to have had another Seagate drive to use for parts and now all is well.

Thanks for your reply.

LOL Yes your description was very verbose. I'm glad you got a resolution using the method described. However, I {think} drives have writable flash memory that is used by the manufacturer to map things like engineering tracks and the likes so the possibility may exist that you would end up with slightly less capacity or some other anomaly by the swap. Of course this is pure speculation on my part but it is born of reading something in the past and may not apply to new(er) drives. I have done exactly the same thing with and old Conner RLL drive many moons ago and it did work. Back then before IDE appeared on the consumer shelf drives were horribly expensive and anything one could do to salvage a drive was well worth the effort.I can remember waiting hours, even days for Gibson Spinrite to try to move data from damaged to good clusters and map those clusters out as bad only to find out it stayed at 30% done for 30 hours :)

It was a mixed blessing how GRC Spinrite kept at it come what may until it strained the data out of a trashed cluster.

It could have done with a "flogging a dead horse" button!