[Leica] Dead Seagate

[hartzell at alerce.com (George Hartzell)]

Tina Manley writes:
 > LUG:
 > 
 > I have a Seagate external hard drive - 1T - which is less than two 
 > months old.  Yesterday it started making whirring sounds and couldn't 
 > be recognized by either my laptop or desktop.  Today it won't even 
 > come on.  I tried switching out cables and power supplies with other 
 > Seagates that I know work.  Nothing.  It's under warranty but if I 
 > send it back, I lose almost two months of scans, over 500GB, and 8 GB 
 > of photos that I downloaded from cards last week and had not yet 
 > backed up :-( (I know that's stupid, but it's a brand new drive and I 
 > was going to back it up before I leave town on Friday.)  If I open up 
 > the case and try to see what's wrong, I void the warranty.
 > 
 > Has anybody got any suggestions for bringing this thing back to life 
 > before I send it back to Seagate?  I'm not a happy camper this morning.

Ouch.  I'm sorry to hear this.

Drives die.  New ones die, old ones die.  The only things that any of
us should have on a single drive are things that we don't mind
loosing.

Backup.  RAID.

I doubt that there's anything inside that you're going to see that
might be wrong.  The fact that it's spinning up and whiring and
clicking suggests that it's something in the disk or it's embedded
electronics, not part of the case or data/power circuitry.

I think that if you send it back to Seagate under warranty they'll
just send you a new one, not repair this one and return it w/ its data
intact.

I guess that it is *possible* that there's a cable loose though, if
you can see how to open it gently and don't mind running the risk of
voiding the warranty, it wouldn't hurt to check.  You have to balance
the small chance of getting it to work again against the reasonable
chance of voiding the warranty.

There are data recovery services that might be able to peel the data
off, but they're expensive and will certainly void the warranty.

g.