Beware! HDD Fixed & Failed Month Later

[TorontoOntario]

Hi!

Just to let you know:

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I did the fix here ... thank gawd for this Forum!

Everything worked fine afterwards.

Suddenly, last week the HardDrive began to studder an' shudder and within 48 hours finally failed entirely.

During my Google Search to discover if anyone else had suffered a similar fate, I was surprised to learn that many are now coming out of the woodwork with the same issue ... it failed ... fixed it ... upgraded Firmware ... HardDrive COMPLETELY died a month 'er so later.

When I say COMPLETELY DIED ... that's it exactly.

Where before the fix, BIOS would not recognize the HardDrive; now I have a problem where BIOS recognizes the HardDrive but Windows stalls out when the HardDrive is being loaded at StartUp ... and, occasionally when the HardDrive manages to get past the Windows StartUp, it remains inaccessible due

An attempted recovery using PTTD and also other reliable Recovery Software miserably failed.

I am not a Hard Drive Mechanic, but as near as I can tell after two days of trying to solve the mess so that I could maybe recover the data is this: The HardDrive continues to spin ... no clicking noises as experienced before the Fix as described in this Forum ... but the Sectors evidently have become inexplicably/completely corrupted.

When attempting to restore the Partition Data using EASEUS Partition Recovery Wizard, the "time required" indicated over five hundred hours needed. My math tells me this is something like twenty days. After 5 hours of operation, the time had hardly changed ... so, obviously a lost cause.

After I had fixed my HardDrive according to the instructions here, I asked if it was necessary to discard the HardDrive and the answer was "No". All the same, I was saving up some money to purchase a new HardDrive so that I could back-up the newly fixed one. At this point, a month or so later, I unfortunately ran out of time ... the HardDrive has completely and utterly failed.

And, I am not the only one stating this experience on the Web.

So, if I was a person who fixed their Seagate HardDrive by using the instructions here, I would make plans ASAP to back it up ... don't wait like I did ... it could suddenly fail again ... and much worse a failure than earlier experienced.

[dencorso]

Well, you were in a bout of bad luck, which I hope may be over already. And so were those others you've found on the internet. In short, I dont believe those latter failures had any relation to the former ones, unless one damaged the HDD somehow during the first recovery (and that should be an uncommon event).

Any drive may fail, die, become totally bricked at any moment. The fact that the Barracuda 7200.11 Serial ATA Product Manual (quoted below) states that the MTBF of the 7200.11 Barracudas is 0.7 million hours means quite exactly that: some will work OK for much longer than that and others will fail right out of the box, but most will fail sometime in-between those extremes, and there is no way of foreknowing when. That's why mean values suck (when you have eaten a great lunch and an even better dinner, while I starved, we both had one meal on average! ).

2.11Reliability

2.11.1Annualized Failure Rate (AFR) and Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) The product shall achieve an Annualized Failure Rate (AFR) of 0.34% (MTBF of 0.7 million hours) when operated

in an environment of ambient air temperatures of 25°C. Operation at temperatures outside the specifications

in Section 2.8 may increase the product AFR (decrease MTBF). AFR and MTBF are population statistics

that are not relevant to individual units.

AFR and MTBF specifications are based on the following assumptions for desktop personal computer environments:

•2400 power-on-hours per year.

•10,000 average motor start/stop cycles per year.

•Operations at nominal voltages.

•Temperatures outside the specifications in Section 2.8 may reduce the product reliability.

•Normal I/O duty cycle for desktop personal computers. Operation at excessive I/O duty cycle may degrade product reliability. The desktop personal computer environment of power-on-hours, temperature, and I/O duty cycle affect the

product AFR and MTBF. The AFR and MTBF will be degraded if used in an enterprise application

The only way of avoiding lost data is to backup, backup, and then backup.

Not for any special reason. Not necessarily because you just recovered from a major falure.

But just to be on the safe side when, not if, something fails.