As we get close to the end of 2015, we have been noticing a trend with Seagate 7200.12 series drives coming in for recovery. Many are coming from older Apple iMac systems, but others are coming from external hard drive enclosures and other brand name computers.
Normally, we receive a high percentage of drives before the final head crash, but with these drives, they are arriving with the client describing them as clicking.
When we open the drives in our clean room, we are finding varying degrees of fatal head crashes. Some worse than others, but almost all unrecoverable with a very dirty filter holding most of the user’s data.
For those of you who are more technical and are able to connect to the Seagate serial port terminal, the terminal output you tend to see, along with the drive clicking for less than an minute then spinning down is as follows:
No HOST FIS-ReadyStatusFlags 2002B001
HighPowerMode
Failed to load overlay 00000004
LED:000000CC FAddr:0028A1B
If you are using a system that contains a Seagate 7200.12 series drive, we advise that you verify that you have a solid backup in place, should the drive fail and test the drive frequently for warning signs of failure. Of course, we recommend this for all hard drives, even those just recently purchased.
Should you be in the unfortunate situation where your Seagate 7200.12 hard drive has failed, please do not make things worse by continually powering it on and trying to recover the data with data recovery software. Rather, contact a Recovery Force team member at 866-750-3169 to discuss your options.