PC hardware: Three brand-new hard drives - Loud Clicking Noises
LACIE HARD DRIVE
by school969 - 6/11/05 2:20 PM In reply to: Hard drives and backups by stephen7144I completely agree. After 4 months my lacie 250 gig hard drive died as well. After a discussion with the company representative who suggested using one data recovery service that would cost about $1800, I found another service who charges a bit less. Apparently the 250g drive stresses the components so much (which are cheap anyway to keep the price down)that these drives are very prone to failure. Lacie appears to be apiece of crap in a slick case. >:-((
LaCie attitude does not help when drives fail
by stephen7144 - 1/6/06 6:20 PM In reply to: LACIE HARD DRIVE by school969The worst part about the LaCie failures is the attitide at LaCie. It starts with techs that seem tp know less than the usual uninformed tech and continues right through the possibility of returning the drive. The failure happens early in the warranty and it takes many months of haphazard advice until return seems the only option. The time spent trying to get this done added to more time salvaging data puts you over the one year since date of purchase and that is the end. Never mind that your discussion and original complaints were well within the one year. You listened to tech support and dawdled in doing so and therefore tough luck becuase they won't even repair it at that point. However, that may be just as well because I would not be able to use any LaCie drive even if free after having the double failure. I could never feel any data was safe on the LaCie, repaired or not.
Solution to disapearing USB HD from Windows and Mac
by furiouscornel - 3/21/07 8:08 AM In reply to: LACIE HARD DRIVE by school969We all know that LaCie is trying to sell it software from ProSoft Engineering. This marketing method is unacceptable and unethical.
Here is what their support replied to me after after I asked them for a solution to this seamminly common problem of LaCie drive suddedly disapearing from Window XP and Mac computers
"It is possible that your drive has experienced some data corruption. The best suggestion to retrieve that data is to try Data Rescue which should be able to scavenge the missing files and copy them to a different volume. It doesn't make any changes to the drive at all, so if it fails, a professional data recovery service can still easily retrieve the data. You can download a demo of it from ProSoft Engineering's website to see if it will work for you. www.prosofteng.com/lacie"
Single licence $129.00/ IT Licence $249.00 and Universal(?) $349.00
Get a life LaCie and stop milking your customers!!!
However I found a solution to this problem (looking at blogs, it seems that 1000's of LaCie customers are having this problem. So here a free solution at $0.00 cost, thanks to the Open Source Community (you rock) ->
Download FREE TestDisk from http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download
Unzip, run [testdisk_win.exe]
Select the external usb drive, select [Proceed ]
Select [ Intel ] Intel/PC partition ->{ENTER}
Select [ Analyze ] Analyze current partition structure and search for lost partitions ->{ENTER}
Next screen just press -> {ENTER}
Next screen select [WRITE] -> {ENTER}
Disconnect USB HD, Power down USB HD
Reconnect and Power up
That's it !!!!!!!!
Windows XP recognition of LaCie hard drives
by KiffLS - 1/5/06 10:35 PM In reply to: Hard drives and backups by stephen7144Here's a suggestion for Windows/LaCie users. Never, NEVER, EVER hot-plug a firewire drive, no matter what anyone tells you! Turn your computer OFF. I mean HARD OFF - power down completely and re-boot! Connect the drive. Turn the computer back on. The drive should be recognized immediately. If it isn't, you've got problems which aren't anything to do with Windows or LaCie's drives. Could be your firewire card. Try an Adaptec. Also, firewire 400 is more reliable than firewire 800, and probably as fast as most users will ever need.
If you have firewire drives that are always in use, just leave them connected. If you have ones that you only use from time to time, make SURE you TURN OFF and RE-BOOT (don't just hibernate) the computer each time you connect a drive. I used to have this problem all the time. Powering off and re-booting every time I connect (or disconnect) a firewire drive totally solved it. Once again, DON'T hot-plug firewire drives - your system won't find them reliably, and the chances of shorting the power bus (if you plug the cable in at an angle) and TERMINALLY FRYING THE DRIVE are very high! I spent several years working in a college media-production lab, and I've seen this problem again and again. Trust me. If you're going to connect or disconnect a firewire drive, TURN EVERYTHING OFF! I CANNOT emphasize this enough!
As for the reliability of LaCie's external hard drives, they're the drive of choice in many recording studios and video editing suites, and are generally among the most reliable external drives available for mission-critical media storage applications. I have 3 (2-200 GB and 1-250 GB) of them connected to my audio/video editing workstation. They often run 24/7 for weeks on end. None of them has ever failed me in any way. Knock wood. These are the heavy-duty D2 models, mind you - not the slick little Porsche ones.
I don't know what brand of drive they use in 'em, but they seem to work as advertised. There's always the possibility of LaCie manufacturing a run of bad units, as the person who's burned out 3 different 250 GB units may have discovered. However, most people I know, including myself, are pretty happy with them.
What was wrong with Hitachi?
by davmax - 2/26/05 12:45 AM In reply to: Get something else besides Maxtor (or Hitachi) by IndianasasinWas it a lack of Disk Manager software? Or was disk failure?
I use Hitachi hard drives(with no problems and quiet)and yes they do lack the Disk Manager software available with WD drives. However they do have a very good free Drive Fitness Test that will recover failed disk surface problems that ultimately occur on drives.
Similar problem with early IBM drives
by davmax - 2/25/05 6:03 PM In reply to: Three brand-new hard drives - Loud Clicking Noises by HarvThis may not be the same but you description of the sound lines up. In previous years IBM hard drives made this noise as they sought to recover a dud sector. I was able to fix this by using an IBM utility that spared these bad surface areas and at that time some excess capacity was used to replace these defectives. It might be worth checking with Maxtor what happens when defects occurs on the disk surface and what can be done to fix this. My experience with IBM (now Hitachi)was that once the bad areas were hidden the were no problems.
I now have Hitachi drives with no problems at all.
Run a real diagnostic
by Gsteele - 2/25/05 6:42 PM In reply to: Similar problem with early IBM drives by davmaxI'd suggest running Spinrite from Gibson Research. It will really get down and dirty with the drive, refresh all data and sector formatting, and look for cross-sector bit pattern interactions. By reading the log, you'll see how the drive is behaving, and whether there are bad sectors that were either recoverable, or that had to be mapped out.
My experience with clicking in hard drives is that there are low-level (servo) problems that are causing the drive controller to re-seek because either the heads are out of alignment or the servo patterns are weak. After all, the user data, formatting data, low-level format, as well as the servo (location) data are all stored magnetically on the disk surface. Hard drive disk surfaces can grow defects. They typically start off as point defects, and owing to galvanic interactions expand over time. If the defect is large enough, the drive's ECC won't be able to correct the data any longer - or the drive won't be able to find the sector, or ... you get the point.
After running spinrite, if it still clicks - as in multiple seeks per read - that's incipient failure no matter how you slice it, and no drive price bargain compensates for the loss of important data, or for that matter, the loss of time spent futzing with the thing reformatting, reinstalling OS, apps, data, yadda yadda. Do you work for $2.00/hour? Count how long you spend rebuilding a hard drive and you'll realize that a few dollars saved on a bogus hard drive are gone in a puff when it goes toes up.
After spinrite (www.grc.com), if it still clicks, send it back. At least you'll have a spinrite log to prove to Maxtor what's going on.
Hope this helps.
Spinrite is good, costs
by davmax - 2/26/05 12:54 AM In reply to: Run a real diagnostic by GsteeleHaving used the IBM\Hitachi Drive Fitness Test to fix a number of drives (actually IBM drives in the past) the one focus of fixing is achieved with free software.
Spinrite is undoubtably better in that it can be a data recovery tool as well. But the cost is US$89.00, to repair a drive is more than a replacement drive for some people. But it is cheap for data recovery.
A good combination if you need it.
Try Western Digital
by bunnyman - 2/26/05 5:27 AM In reply to: Spinrite is good, costs by davmaxI've been using Western Digital Drives in my PC & ALL I build. Haven't seen a drive yet that had trouble. Noteworthy, I am guessing here, but isn't the Maxtor Drives you're getting the ATA133 ones? If so, does your system board support ATA133? I know mine supports up to ATA100 in EIDE mode. WD only has ATA100 in EIDE drives. SATA is up to ATA150. My WD drives have ALL been SILENT while in operation. Only "click" I ever hear is on shutdown when the head parks. Normal there.Never a noise while read & write.
TRY WD
by ZEUSMAN - 5/6/05 4:44 PM In reply to: Try Western Digital by bunnymanHello,
I have had his exact problem with TWO WD's.
One, I am looking at right now, that is just out of time for WD to replace it.
I get nothing on a boot except the loud clicking from the inner coiled disk reader.
I can't even access it as a slave to recover anything on it.
The other trouble maker was the Maxtor 20 Gig that mysteriously lost the two back partitions.
I had it partitioned in 3 for several years with no problems, not even the clicking he mentioned from his Maxtors.
One morning, no access to the D, E drives. They didn't appear in the my computer listing either.
Uh Oh!
I ran a program called Recover my Data, sure enough, after a very lengthy run, it found all the data from both back drives but they want $75 to say hello to this data again.
I have no idea why the partitions became hidden. Its never happened before, though I've formatted other drives exactly the same was, even the one I'm using now...an 80 GIG WD.
I even tried to access these hidden partitions in DOS, but that didn't fly either. Not even with FDISK.
So, I aggravate myself intentionally sometimes as I look at the Maxtor 20 GIG with all that stuff on it that I can't recover.
ZEUSMAN
TSMITH3680@HOTMAIL.COM
Do Not Try Western Digital Products
by treehh - 8/19/05 12:57 PM In reply to: Try Western Digital by bunnymanA 250GB Sata just failed on me within 2 months of purchase of the product. All the data gone.
Quite true
by Gsteele - 2/26/05 6:27 AM In reply to: Spinrite is good, costs by davmaxI had forgotten that Spinrite costs $89.00 for a first time buyer; I've been upgrading since the original Spinrite, and it only costs $29 to upgrade, which is a bargain if you need it in your toolkit - especially if you have multiple computers, and use it to investigate problems with friends' computers. But it's powerful and its diagnosis is well-accepted.
SpinRite saves the day
by larry223 - 4/12/05 1:01 PM In reply to: Spinrite is good, costs by davmaxSpinRite is a fantastic product if you need to recover unreadable data from a magnetic drive. I have had occassion to use it 3 times in the last 17 years (the most recent was yesterday on an XP laptop hardrive) and it worked flawlessly each time to recover totally dead drives. Yesterday I used Spinrite 6 on an NTFS partition that couldn't be recovered with Windows XP recovery tools. SpinRite found the bad sectors, repaired the data and my laptop is back to normal. $89 is a cheap price to pay for recovering lost data!
SpinRite
by hagbard44 - 5/20/05 2:06 PM In reply to: SpinRite saves the day by larry223I discovered SpinRite back in '88 (1988) when we used MFM and RLL drives (20 MB HDD) and have kept using it since on "dead" drives and have had great success with it. Gibson really invented a winner with this software as it has recovered several HD's that sounded like coffee grinders. My flatmates Maxtor 60 Gb was so loud we could hear it seeking from the room next door (No clicking - just a coffee grinder full of pennies). After running spinrite, the noise did not lessen by much, but it kept on working for another 8 months with no problems other than bloody loud noises. It was still working fine when it was put into a games server (in the back room with the door shut). Personally I use Seagate drives as they have a 5 year guarantee. 2 * 120's SATA striped array and a 200 ATA. Not a sound.
SpinRite 6 inquiry
by case42 - 5/21/06 10:17 PM In reply to: SpinRite saves the day by larry223this is about my hard drive problem. i used SpinRite 6 to recover my data but as of the moment or within 12hours of waiting it is still in .14% of 99.86%. i just wonder if this is totaly hang or do i need to wait until it was finish. the .14% is just started at about 11hours ago as of this writing...(1 hour when I started to run SpinRite 6 at my Laptop.
I just wonder if there is a fast way that I can recover my Harddrive or even my data only....
I shall appreciate advice of everyone...thanks
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