There are two common, very specific causes of premature failure among Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 SATA Hard Drives. Many of these were manufactured with a fault in the drive's firmware that could cause it to enter a permanent busy state, rendering the drive undetectable by a computer's BIOS even after power cycling. While the data on the disc is unaffected, a drive exhibiting this behaviour is impossible to access by normal means.

Another possible fault can cause the drive to be reported in the BIOS as having zero size. Such a drive will not be visible within the operating system, although all data on the drive is perfectly intact. It is possible for both of these faults to be present on a single drive, although one makes the other impossible to detect. Both of these conditions are also known to affect some Barracuda ES.2 and Maxtor DiamondMax 22 hard drives.

If you have one of these hard drives and you boot your computer one day to find that it will not boot into the operating system or the hard drive appears to be missing altogether, chances are you have been affected by this widely known problem.

In 95% of cases the affected drive is in otherwise good mechanical condition and can be restored. At Thanet Computer Repair we can use our customised tools to connect directly to the affected Hard Drive's firmware and manually reset it to working condition without affecting your data. Once in working condition we will back up your data and update ('flash') the drive's firmware to an updated revision that will fix the initial error. We can also copy your data to a new, unaffected drive if you wish.

Symptoms:

• Drive not detected in BIOS
• Drive detected in BIOS but reports 0 size
• Drive does spin up normally
• No unusual noises or errors

• ST31000340AS, ST31000640AS
• ST3750330AS, ST3750630AS
• ST3640330AS, ST3640630AS
• ST3500320AS, ST3500620AS, ST3500820AS
• ST31500341AS, ST31000333AS
• ST3640323AS, ST3640623AS
• ST3320613AS, ST3320813AS
• ST3160813AS

• ST31000340NS
• ST3750330NS
• ST3500320NS
• ST3250310NS

• STM31000340AS, STM31000640AS
• STM3750330AS, STM3750630AS
• STM3500320AS, STM3500620AS, STM3500820AS
• STM31000334AS
• STM3320614AS
• STM3160813AS

Known Firmware Revisions Affected:
     SD15, SD16, SD17, SD18, SD19, SD81, MX15

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01843 851 077