I wanted to reformat my main box, well, it has just under 200 movies on it and 14k songs, a plethora of software, emails, pictures, etc ... so I purchased a Seagate Freeagent Desk 1.5TB external hard drive.

I put all of my data on to it. Reformatted the server and was good to go. The server had two ATA drives totalling 160GB and one SATA drive that is 320GB. I wanted to use SATA because that's what the board uses without conversion. So, I eliminated the ATA drives and put all 400 GB of data on the external hard drive. Worked great!

Got the server up and running and without the ATA drives as the master, it runs awesome! It's only 320GB now, instead of almost 500GB but thats okay by me.




My laptop has been running funny since i upgraded from windows vista to windows 7. I've dealt with it cuz i didnt wanna go through the whole process of doing my machine all over. I've had several virus's to see if I could get rid of them, I did. But there's one thing with google that when i click a link, im redirected to something else other than the link clicked. I found the fix, did it, but theres still the other issues from the upgrade.

So, I decided, time to wipe'er clean and start fresh with Windows 7!

Last night I plugged my external hard drive in, seen all my data and what not ... created a directory for all of my laptop files and started the transfer!

It completed this morning and when I realized I was missing my outlook.pst file I shut outlook down, transferred the pst file and left the room. Came back and posted a few times here ... then heard a beep. Faint beep. After looking around for a bit, realized it was coming from near my feet, my external hard drive.

Long story short, it's dead and has all of my data on it. It's nice of Seagate to offer a data recovery service just for this failure at a meek $800 charge.


Do not buy Seagate external hard drives. I did research on it and this is a VERY common issue. Most of the reviews said a month is when it expired on them, I didn't even have mine a full 10 days. I used it only twice!


So now I'm out of just about every digitally owned piece of data I ever had, stuff that's been "mine" since 1998.


That's what I get for putting all my eggs in one .... external hard drive.

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Know if there was a firmware upgrade for that drive? While trying to select a hard drive for my computer, I did read a lot of negative reviews for seagate drives but I seem to recall there being a firmware fix for some of them. Not that that does you any good now, nor will you be buying a seagate drive again, but just an FYI.

*Looks in computer again*

Whee, I have a seagate drive. Time to take my own advice :)

Luckily, with the 4 failed hard drives from my second laptop (a dell, that thing was a complete lemon), I've formed good backup practices. The downside was losing hundreds of hours (maybe more than a thousand) on a programming project I was working on the first time that failed, about 6 months after a backup. I don't think I ever started a major project again.

I was pretty ignorant, I figured my Western Digital has never failed me (holds packers highlights and full games) so this one wouldn't be any different.

100 bucks for a 1.5TB hard drive ... should have known better.


But hey, I paid 6 bucks for the product replacement plan!!! Yay! That was stupid in hindsight. I don't care about the damn device, I care more about the data on it and a new device won't do me shit.

I want to rip it open and get my data, but that's also 100 bucks wasted if there's a way to fix it. Which looks bleek.

It doesn't even illuminate the lights anymore. Once power is plugged in, it starts beeping, it doesn't even get recognized by the computer.

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Well, I got it to power up now, by using a separate power adapter. The light is pulsating, not sure if it did that before.

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Well, if you can get the drive recognized by windows you could always try "Obtaining" some professional data recovery software for free. Might even be possible if Windows doesn't know it's there, but BIOS does.

The pulsating light was saying the power was too low. It was 9v and it needs 12v.

Really ticking me off. I think I'm gonna just rip the hard drive out and get the data that way. I'm thinking theres something stopping the device an if I can bypass it, I'll be okay.

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does this mean my pics are gone?

I paid $100 for a Western Digital 1TB hard drive from TigerDirect. Had it over a year now and it's running great. My 120gb external from Maxtor I've had for over 4 years now but I rarely use it. I've had two hard drives blow on me but not of their own accord--I was transferring my computer from Milwaukee to Madison and when I plugged it in the power supply literally blew up. Not a giant explosion or anything but it fried both my hard drives. Luckily I was working at a computer shop at the time and my boss hooked up a data recovery for $300. It worked great and I got everything back from my main hard drive.

My dad is so wary with hard drives he always sets up a raid. He has a two 500gb hard drives that mirror each other so if one fails he has a backup. I really need to do this because if the hard drive I have now blew up I would kill myself lol. Work, school work, video projects, music recordings, photoshop work, website designs, etc., I would lose half my life there lol.

So I think I'm screwed

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No more pix of 4Pack? LOL!
Anyway.....i wish i understood all the "jargon". Maybe it's good that i'm computer stupid.
Although i wish there was some way for me to help you, Kevin!

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