hard drive drama

If you can boot and F10 to the Bios, and if Hitachi is like HP, there'll be a disk diagnostic you can run...will tell you if it's a hard disk failure.

You have recovery disks, right? and a backup of your hard disk?

There are tests (antiviral/trojan, etc.) you should run on your backups too, before putting them on any replacement disk.

P.S. Good luck!   And maybe you should be calling Hitachi tech support?

I use datadoctor from www.datadoctor.org, it gets info off drives that fail, it rebuilt all my files on a La Cie firewire HD that showed up as empty but was my backup. It cost about $50 a year ago but was much cheaper than a software restoration service I priced $300 minimum. For your disk you could get an enclosure for it to turn it into a USB disk then use datadoctor recovery.

If under warranty it would be replaced but you need your info off it too.

Did you check all the connections to it? Reseat them.

hi dr

i have tried everything and double checked but the drive wont come up - if i put it internal the pc wont boot. when i put it as usb it says drive "unkown and unreadable" - to make matters worse i have 2 of these hitachi deskstar and both are doing the same thing. its really a pain coz i cannot access anything on either. i tried restoring with back up but its useless. maybe i should bash them both with a hammer  lol

thanx ausvet - i will check it out and start praying (not paying hopefully) lol

have just tried datadoctor and that cannot read it either tho it did list it

yrag would be the right guy for this. If he doesn't see your dilemma Louise, you may have to find a data recovery service.

A separate issue is the fact that two of these Hitachi Deskstars are doing (or not doing) this at the same time. That isn't a coincidence...rather, that's two too many for coincidence.

Does anyone else have access to these computers? Could they have picked up a "lethal infection" somehow?

i dont use the hitachis at the same time - the first i changed coz it was unknown etc and now this other one doing the same thing, everything was fine then suddenly the vista boot up indicator just kept going and going and no access.

its driven me crazy, hitachi say run a diagnostic but as soon as i plug it in to pc the computer wont boot at all. it has all my artwork and stuff on it and i spent 11 hours the other day just 2 get the pc to start - using a maxtor. i have it as a usb drive but no luck - unknown/unreadable.

Sounds like something in common to both machines is the problem...did you have an electrical storm? Surges?

Doesn't Hitachi have TechSupport to try to help with your problem?

If not, and you have important/valuable stuff on the disks....send them to a data recovery service. Hitachi has got to try to help you....keep them on the phone until it's resolved one way or another.

i have tried shuffling them from sata i thru sata 4 - no joy, the diagnostic wont run coz software not compatable - oh the joy of it.

I'm gonna ask starkers to have a look at this thread...I hope he can help somehow...maybe try to email him or pm him, Louise.

List your system specs.

I'm no expert and not at all sure why this has happened, but with a second Hitachi disc not reading, either, I'm wondering if it's a motherboard issue and the BIOS can no longer recognise them... meaning Windows can't either.  The reason I don't think it's the Hitachi HDD's themselves is because....

If the Maxtor is also presenting you with issues, then I tend to think it is a motherboard issue and the SATA /IDE connections... given the drives do appear (if not functional) when mounted as USB's.  However, I'm only guessing and yrag is definitely the man for the job, because even IF I am right I'm not sure as to how to fix it.

Best of luck with it, though... I hope you're up and running again soon.

I wouldn't trust a deskstar to host my recycle bin... As you've noticed, they are majorly unreliable. Most harddrives tend to start sounding funny, and cause minor issues before failing... Deskstars just die, they don't have the nickname deathstars for nothing.

Experience tells me you're out of luck when it comes to getting the data out of the drives yourself. Your case *may* be different though, it's hard to tell, as we don't have physical access to check your stuff.

Interesting. I have two Hitachi 320Gb drives which have been running for 3 years, and a 500Gb Hitachi which has been running for two years.

Previously I used Maxtor and out of the last 6 drives, 5 failed within 18 months...

Obviously most drives work well for years, even those with a bad reputation. I've seen a HUGE lot of broken deskstars at work (a 600 computer company) where most computers worked fine (pretty much all the computers had deskstars, as hardware was standardized), there was a continuous stream of harddrive failures though, something like 5 each week or so... Drives that decided to just die at some point... We started switching the drives to western digital (which was seen as reliable drives at the time), and after a few months, we noted that drive failure rate went down do about 5 each month instead... That's why I don't trust deskstar.

There was still hundreds of deskstars running just fine when I left the company though.

What on earth do you do with your computers?

Can't you afford footballs?...;)

Harddrives 'should' show less failures than that....you're far more likely to get DVD or floppy drive failures....they're the ones built-to-a-price-not-a-quality.

Only real 'failure' I had the pleasure of watching was due to a short from the PC speaker terminal to the chassis.....every time the thing posted it was the sound of a few thousand more sectors dying.....btw....that was back when a 1gig was BIG...;)

Well, there was still a huge lot of deskstars around to fail, I would think the company I worked for got down to the more normal failure rates after getting rid of even more or those evil ones. I didn't stay long enough to see a month go by without a single harddrive failure on any of the 600 computers that was up and running.

Given a Maxtor would also not read correctly internally, I still think it's a mobo issue (and subsequently a Bois one also) rather than a faulty HDD.  Furthermore, hard drives generally give some warning that they're on the way out, and according to the OP, these didn't and just suddenly stopped working.

Mikeko, the company you worked for may just have gotten a bad batch, as can sometimes happen with any product and is just one of those things, but my sister and others I know have gotten several years good service from Hitachi HDD's

Now if you were talking Google drives, I'd be all over it with you and would seek donations so we could take out full-page ads in all the major newspapers.

There is only ONE tool that will fix this....... it's called "Spinrite". Google it........ you won't be disappointed.

Good Luck! B[]

>LINK< - There....

Not just a bad batch in that case.

OK, so IBM/Hitachi have acknowledged issues with some of their drives, some more than others, but in loukeeya's case she says there were no early warning signs, just that the the drives just ceased to be read by the BOIS and Vista at boot.  It may be that the Hitachi drives have had the biscuit, but it just seems strange that a Maxtor is also affected when mounted internally, which suggests there is another probable cause... unless the Hitachi took down the mobo, SATA connections when it died, meaning no drives will run when mounted internally.

Hmmm... the thot plickens.

I don't get the impression that the maxtor is having trouble though. Seems to be used as a working alternative to me?

According to this...

.. the issue is with both the Maxtor and the Hitachi's... suggesting to me that the mobo/BIOS is having difficulty reading drives mounted internally but can see the Maxtor when mounted as a USB, although the data on it appears to be inaccessible.

Funny thing, my sister rang me a short while ago to say she is experiencing a similar thing (no, not the one with the Deskstar) with her old rig... when she powers up it just screams at her and she has to turn it off. She's talking about finding the cause and getting it fixed, but I don't fancy her chances as it has a 939 socket AMD CPU and mobo, and you just can't get those here in Oz anymore.

Fortunately, my mother gave her her PC to my sister when she went to the UK to live, which I rebuilt/upgraded and formatted with Vista Ultimate for her, so she has a working PC to keep her going.

i bought HD Regenerator for £60 - money well spent as its not only fixed both hard drives but have been able to access my date - i am so so so happy  lol

Loukeeya, what exactly was the problem? Was it ever diagnosed? What did yrag say?

So happy you're back!