Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3750640AS Drive Fail Not Spinning Up

Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3750640AS hard drive is not spinning up, turning slowly.

The fault was the drive was not rotating up to full speed and then ticking constantly.

Opening the drive, I found out why:

Head is missing from this Seagate Barracuda

Full of dirty ground up filings

Soiled dust filter

This website explains the phenomenon of the platter coating coming off and confirms that these drives suck so many ways!

Here is some photos of another drive of the same model.  This one has a bearing issue, constant squealing.  A good reason to avoid these drives!

p.s the 720011 and the 7200.12 are also plagued by others problems.  Best to stay away from them as well...
http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Barracuda-XT-Barracuda-Barracuda/Barracuda-7200-11-firmware-What-we-know/m-p/16763
http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Barracuda-XT-Barracuda-Barracuda/Seagate-7200-12-500GB-ST3500410AS-problems-and-reallocated/td-p/71000


WindyCityTech Blogger
WindyWindyCityTech Wordpress

DIY Data Recovery from a WD2500 Caviar Hard Drive

I had a WD2500 Hard Drive that was not working, no spin up or anything.  It seemed that the board was not working, but there was no signs of failure.

Fortunately, I found another WD2500 board which was working.

A simple board swap did not work, the heads started chattering when plugged in.

To really fix it, it is necessary to remove a 8 pin rom chip on the "broken" board and solder it to a "good" donor board.  If you cannot do this, find someone who can or you will get nowhere.

Once this was done, the hard drive started without a problem, the data was dragged off ASAP.

Make sure you identify the rom chips plus the good and bad boards to make the process easier.
WindyCityTech Blogger
WindyWindyCityTech Wordpress

FetchTV Box Filesystem is XFS

Examining the hard drive of the FetchTV box is a easy, just unplug the SATA cable and connect it to a USB to SATA adapter.
The hard drive can be powered from the FetchTV box directly with it's internal SATA cable disconnected with no problems.

The file system is one partition containing a XFS file system, it is no problem to mount this drive using Ubuntu..

There is three directories on the drive; DATASTORE, PVOD and PVR.  The root directory contains some interesting large files such as logs and settings.

In the DATASTORE directory there is some configuration files including the ISP specific config, all in plain text and easy to mod.  Will post these files soon...

WindyCityTech Blogger
windywindycitytech wordpress