Professional Data Recovery Services

Home	Process	Get Quote	Models	Typical cases	Sounds	Shipping	FAQ	Partnership	Contact

Seagate Momentus 7200 Data Recovery Information

These are some real problems experienced by Momentus 7200 and Seagate hard drives in general.

My hard disk Seagate(model Momentus 7200) was in portable casing and I had connected it to my laptop and after a few hours a strange whistle sound came and I switched of my Laptop and disconnected my Hard Drive. Now Hard Disk is not detecting anymore and there is clicking sound as I turn on the power. I have checked the PCB and on visible layer there doesnt seem to be any damage.
Mohammed M.
Cairo, Egypt

Seagate Barracuda drives, and especially 7200.7, 7200.8, 7200.9 and 7200.10 series have a very common problem with heads. Seagate introduced new technology in this line - special coating for the platters that was supposed to protect magnetic layer. But in fact it caused more problems than protection. Under special conditions this coating starts to flake and tiny bits of this substance stick to the head read/write elements. Reading becomes more and more unstable, the drive starts losing tracks and at some point typical symptoms or bad heads appear - clicking, knocking, sweeping sounds: , , making the data inaccessible.

Typically data recovery in this case involves opening the drive in class 100 clean room and replacing head assembly from matching donor. But our engineers have developed special technological process for cleaning the heads and quite often it is sufficient to temporarily repair them for successful recovery. The fact that we often don't need to order donors for such drives makes data retrieval in our lab less expensive for our customers.

The drive was connected to a PC when there was a power failure on the PC. After that the disk drive was not seen by windows XP. When I power on the disk drive, the motor spins up and I think I hear a single click. The motor don't spin down. On a running drive, the motor spins up then the heads move on the disk drive several times.
Predrag M.
Skopje, Macedonia

Another common issue with Seagate hard drives is damage to the components on the cirquit board(PCBA). Hard drives in general are very vulnerable to overheating, power spikes and surges. Bad power supply unit combined with power streak is usually enough to burn spindle motor controller driver(SMOOTH chip) on the logic board. If this occurs the computer would reboot itself or shutdown completely, you would normally notice acrid smell and when powered on the drive would not spin up at all.

Non-spinning could also be a symptom of seized motor on multi-platter Seagate Barracuda drives. The drive would also make buzzing sound like it's trying to spin up. Data recovery in this case requires transplanting platters from bad drive into donor in clean room environment.

Seagate laptop Momentus drives also share some typical 2.5 inch HDD problems. One of them is heads sticktion to the platter surface.

Heads are normally parked on the parking ramp outside of the platters, but sometimes due to a fall or abnormal termination they fail to return to their regular parking position and are left on the surface. Immediately after the motor stops spinning they stick to the ideally smooth surface and it becomes impossible to release them without proper tools and experience. Don't attempt to open the drive by yourself - you will damage the platters for sure and this could make all your data unrecoverable.

No, it occasionally spins up, I hear a sound which I imagine is the actuator loading, then I hear a single "click" which I imagine is an unload, then it immediately spins down. I had removed it from the case to just take a look. Until today I did not realize that it was sometimes spinning up, although it usually does not.
Brett J
Birmingham, England

There is one more problem that is typical for all hard drives: bad sectors. After some period of time magnetic media the platters are covered with starts to degrade and bad sectors develop.
Whenever the drive hits such unreadable bad sector it could start scratching, freezing, ticking and sometimes loud clicking: . This leads to further damage to the surface and causes more data loss. As soon as you start experiencing such symptoms while reading important files stop the drive immediately to prevent further data loss. In our lab we use special imaging hardware tools that are capable of reading raw sector data ignoring checksum check. That's usually the only way to retrieve as much data as possible from these sectors.

Seagate drives operate under special firmware microcode that could also fail sometimes. Typically hard drives with corrupted firmware spin up normally, do not click but still fail to initialize. Such drives could have one of the following symptoms:

HDD is not found in BIOS at all
shows up with wrong S/N or capacity,
fails to read any data or boot up operating system.

If you attempt to boot up from such drive or read any data from it you would get "Primary Master Hard Disk Fail", "No operating system found", "Drive Mount Failure", "Disk boot failure. Insert system disk and press enter", "USB Device malfunctioned", "S.M.A.R.T. Capable But Command Failed" or some other BIOS hard drive error message on boot.
Seagate's new family - Barracuda 7200.11, specifically with FW version SD15 has especially high firmware failure rate. In such cases hard drive either doesn't show up in BIOS at all or identifies with 0 capacity. Seagate knows about this problem - they have even released a firmware update for these drives to prevent this failure from happening in the future. Unfortunately applying this update won't help if the drive has already failed.

If you experience any of the symptoms described above with your Seagate Momentus 7200 please feel free to contact us to get upfront quote on data recovery from your failed drive.

If you hear your Seagate Momentus 7200 hard drive making some other unusual noises visit our Hard Drive Sounds page for more details.