HELP! ANOTHER Seagate Drive has let me down.

[lateagain]

ANOTHER Seagate Drive has let me down.

They come out top in all the reviews, top spec, great performance etc. etc. ......BUT what you need in an HDD is reliability.

The previous meltdown was a few years back now but I lost a lot of stuff. Turns out that the specific model disc had obviously had a faulty batch issue because when it happened a quick Google threw up scores of threads and some piss poor responses from Seagate.

So obviously I learned from the disaster and immediately set up some discs to duplicate saves of important stuff so that I'd be in with a chance if it EVER happened again.

Last machine I bought is now pretty old but I used it purely as a box for my Simulators (it was a build specifically for FS...) although ironically I never got round to installing that because REAL life curtailed my hobby time. So my faithful Win 7 box laboured on and thankfully still hasn't let me down.

The one thing I decided quite early on was to keep everything other than that which was essential to the OS on separate physical drives. Logic being if C drive melts down you merely need to reinstall the OS on a new disc and everything else is safe on seperate drives? When SSD's came down in price I invested in some of those and put a vast majority of my Sim stuff on those. That meant the 2Tb Seagate HDD that shipped with the newer box was only used for documents, downloads, pictures and music ...plus of course the miscellaneous stuff we all pick up. It was nowhere near full and in fact had a vast amount of unused space.

When the Win 7 support ended I used the newest box to upgrade to Win 10. A painless process and it's been working fine ever since .......until this morning when the disc disappeared. A quick check in Disk management and there is was with no letter allocated BUT with no option to re-allocate one. The only option to re-initialize (re format) the disc.

Now a quick Google came up with some free utilities to "get your files back" but Seagate's site referred to disc recovery software but this wasn't obvious in their utilities downloads and the only option seemed to be to phone a help line?

So:-

Has anyone used Seagate's disc recovery software?
How did you get it?
Was it free?
Did it work?

and/or

Has anyone any recommendations for disc recovery software that they know has worked?

I tried one years back when the previous drive failed and it actually got data from the disc but it was so fragmented it was unusable

Any help appreciated.

PS in the meantime I've ordered an SSD to replace the failed drive and a further external SSD to "back-up" that which I've already backed up. "It ain't backed up unless its in at least three different drives"

Thanks in advance

[geepster775]

Remember that win 10 has a 'feature' to offload seldom used files to the cloud that one needs to be vigilant of.

The only time I ever lost drives (2 in relatively quick order, both showing burn marks on PCB board), was due to a flaking power supply with a voltage regulation problem. PSU replaced and problem stopped.

[Rick-MONON]

Does the data in Computer Management say Raw Data , if so, it maybe recoverable, I just went through this also with 2 WD HDD's, got almost all back, with the same file structure, the MBR got corrupted.

[geepster775]

MBR is the 'old' disk format structure that generally comes with older BIOS and older OSes

GPT is the 'new' disk format structure that only comes with newer UEFI and newer OSes

Via a new machine purchase I went straight from XP/BIOS/NTFS on MBR to 8.1/UEFI/NTFS on GPT. I skipped Vista and Win7 and never was in a transitory position to do piecemeal upgrades of any one of those pieces. My 8.1 UEFI can read MBR drives in a crossover emergency, but it often triggers the 'dirty bit' setting for that drive so when that MBR drive is reattached to the XP box, it throws a need to run CHKDSK.

[brama]

ANOTHER Seagate Drive has let me down.

Has anyone used Seagate's disc recovery software?
Yes.

How did you get it?
https://www.seagate.com/support/kb/h...able-007843en/

Was it free?
Sure is.

Did it work?
50/50
Had one disk with an electronic failure that was dead as a dodo (electronics run on smoke. I had no smoke left )
The second one had a bad sector that corrupted one file allocation table. After repair I was able to rescue my files.

PS in the meantime I've ordered an SSD to replace the failed drive and a further external SSD to "back-up" that which I've already backed up. "It ain't backed up unless its in at least three different drives"
Don't use an SSD for offline storage if it is not regularly used. It gets 'alzheimer' when it is not powered frequently.

I periodically back up files from my my SSD to my (Synology) NAS. In it are two HDD's in RAID 1 mode (mirrored) So if one fails, I can rebuild from the remaining HDD.

[pwillard]

I had the same issue this week... Seagate drive failed. I replaced it with a different brand SSD. Luckily, I keep backups. Note: in the past, I have recovered failed drive data using Minitool Partition Wizard, but I have the *full* version, not free. So, if the issue is not mechanical, it's possible.

[scottb613]

Hi Geoff,

Just for future reference from my experience building PC's in the Flight Sim community for decades - where we tend to need and have much better hardware than we typically see here (modern high speed overclocked custom built boxes are the norm) - the brands preferred like 10:1 are Western Digital for mechanical hard drives and Samsung for SSD's. I haven't lost a WD yet (knock on wood) while I have had Seagate failures. YMMV...

Regards,
Scott

[Rick-MONON]

The 2 I lost this year on win 10 was 2 WD 2TB hdd's with in 1 month of each other.
I recovered the data with EaseUS software. It even kept the same file structure.

[lateagain]

Hi Geoff,

Just for future reference from my experience building PC's in the Flight Sim community for decades - where we tend to need and have much better hardware than we typically see here (modern high speed overclocked custom built boxes are the norm) - the brands preferred like 10:1 are Western Digital for mechanical hard drives and Samsung for SSD's. I haven't lost a WD yet (knock on wood) while I have had Seagate failures. YMMV...

Regards,
Scott

Thanks for all the replies guys.

Thanks Wim the only "extra" I've had to order is some USB flash drives to create a Boot disc for the Seagate stuff.

Pete, WOW they want $129 for the "pro version" of that and I've got most data backed up. Just not (NOTE TO SELF) the downloads of various utility programmes, apps and patches. That's going to be a folder on the New External drive, either to backup the rescued stuff or backup any future saves of redownloaded stuff.

Scott, yes The computer support unit at my old College favoured WD and back when I was still working SSD's were not an option. Unfortunately the PC I bought came with the Seagate, and if you believe the reviews they get the manufacturer can't be accused of not fitting what the reviewers rated "the best" I used to build my own boxes but when it got to the prebuilt ones working out cheaper than the cost of the components I gave up. I've used the same UK builder for years now and their machines have always been excellent (Mesh, if anyone in the UK is interested.)

I've gone all SSD now as the Seagate was the last mechanical drive in the machine. Of course that doesn't beat file structure errors but it eliminates mechanical faults and they are fast?

I too favour Samsung external SSD's and just bought another T5 which is very fast and not much bigger than a Credit card. The only thing big about it is the price LOL! but they're coming down already. My two older M3 units have been (touch wood) great so far.

BTW Wim there's no issue with my external SSD's because I back stuff up by saving it to 3 places every time. That may seem long winded but hey! It works and there's no doubt that you actually have the back-up. I'm a bit cynical about RAID after a critical server at the College had a 5 disc RAID set up and 4 of them failed!!! That's an expensive tool to have fail????

One thing I do is shut down every night. I also run regular scans with Spybot and C Cleaner as well as having a constantly on Virus/Malware checker of a well known make. That comes as part of the deal with my ISP.

[niknak]

For what it's worth my SSD is a Toshiba A100. Hopefully it'll be trouble-free...