I recently bought a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 500GBs and I thought it was working fine till today. There had been an odd noise coming from my computer and I was trying to figure out what was making it, I found out that it wasn't one of the fans in there so I started to rule out the harddrives (I've got 3), of course it turned out to be this Seagate drive with the odd noise, but I figured there wasn't really anything I could do about it because it was a hard drive doing it. So I plugged everything back in and left it for a while. Later that day I decided to try Seagate's Seatools on the drive to see if there was a real problem with it, at first I ran the short self test and that passed but then after trying a short generic and then a short self test again it kept said "aborted" even though I didn't press the abort button. I found this pretty strange but at least I got one Pass so I just went with that, but then after one reboot the drive is now unreadable. It fails the Seatools test, both in windows and DOS and even my Bios says its "empty" as in 0MB on it. It doesn't even show up in "Computer" with the rest of my partitions. It shows up under device manager as working and all, but unreadable. Please someone help, Im blank here as to what to do, and its got a lot of important data to me on it, especially my documents which Vista just seems to ignore that they're gone.
I would either try to access it via a converter (i.e., SATA to USB or IDE to USB, check Newegg) to make it an external drive, or run SpinRite if you're really desperate.
You could try just hooking up just your main OS drive and the drive thats giving you problems. If you get it to show up then get the info off that you need right away. Sounds like you have the bearings going out. You may need to let it cool down for a bit before trying it. I have had some success doing it this way with bad drives. If that doesn't work, try putting it in another computer and see if it shows up there.
Just RMA it. If it fails a test there is definitively something wrong. I have seen disks fail some tests and pass some other.
I tried Spinrite, it couldn't even find the drive, it just stops at "Discovering Mass Sporage drives" and there's some wierd errors coming up when the FreeDOS starts up. Works just fine when the drive isn't plugged in though. I can't believe how fast that Seatools program was able to turn my 500GB of lovely storage into a stupid paperweight. RMA seems like a winner now (although I always feel like the loser when doing so) but I still would like to get my old data back
as others have said just RMA the drive try http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/warranty_&_returns_assistance
