Seagate Hard Drive Failure

Welcome to Apple Discussions!
Your best bet is to call AppleCare. This is a user to user forum, and mileage may vary depending on what cause created the hard drive dying. In the future always backup your data*:

http://www.macmaps.com/backup.html

- * Links to my pages may give me compensation.

Have you actually determined the drive has failed? Although that's certainly a possibility it isn't that likely to happen. Instead the drive may only require reformatting. Before you remove the drive try the following:

Extended Hard Drive Preparation

1. Open Disk Utility in your Utilities folder. If you need to reformat your startup volume, then you must boot from your OS X Installer Disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Installer menu (Utilities menu for Tiger or Leopard.)

2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Note the SMART status of the drive in DU's status area. If it does not say "Verified" then the drive is failing or has failed and will need replacing. SMART info will not be reported on external drives. Otherwise, click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.

3. Set the number of partitions from the dropdown menu (use 1 partition unless you wish to make more.) Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID (only required for Intel Macs) then click on the OK button. Click on the Partition button and wait until the volume(s) mount on the Desktop.

4. Select the volume you just created (this is the sub-entry under the drive entry) from the left side list. Click on the Erase tab in the DU main window.

5. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, check the button for Zero Data and click on OK to return to the Erase window.

6. Click on the Erase button. The format process can take up to several hours depending upon the drive size.

If you are unable to accomplish the above because the drive is not visible in DU, then it may be possible the drive has failed.

I had the same issue with the Hard-drive "crashing" and the folder with the question mark upon re boot.

Took it to the Genius bar at my local Apple store.

The guy there had it fixed it 5 minutes with all data still intact

Then contact AppleCare or take it to your local repair shop. The drive is under warranty for at least three years.

Hi,

It is worth taking your MacBook to the Apple retail store if there is one within a reasonable distance. I don't know what magic thing they can do that nobody else can do, but it is worth investigating.

If the hard drive is truly defective, ironically Seagate has a pretty good data recovery service that will evaluate any manufacturer's drive free of charge. I sent them a Maxtor drive that had become unbootable in an APC system management unit. Within a day, I got a call back; they found the drive's internal geometry table was corrupt, and they thought they could recover the data. I got lucky and found a new system management unit on eBay for only slightly more cost than the estimate for the data recovery, so I ultimately did not use the Seagate recovery service.

The failure mode for the Seagate drives in MacBooks is pretty catastrophic. The heads can detach from the positioning arm and fall onto the surface of the recording medium.

Unfortunately, this illustrates that backing up one's system frequently is very important. Hard drives have become so much more reliable in the last few years that failures are rare and it is easy to forget how disruptive it can be when a mechanical failure does happen.

-Bill

Well, I don't know if this is a coincidence but here it goes. My MacBook (Black) just quit on me about a week ago. I was working with mail and it just froze. When I rebooted, all I got was an empty folder with the question mark inside. I tried running Disk Utilities from my CD but no drive was found, busted drive. I went to Apple Care and they replaced the drive. No info recovered. My sister came in this morning with basically the same problem. Over the weekend her MacBook (White) froze and would not restart, it just hangs. I turned it off and will run disk diagnostics later this afternoon although I am pretty sure the same will happen to her disk. But the most incredible thing of all is that since about a week ago, my iMac at home is freezing up in the same manner as the two MacBooks. Before reading this I just imagined some new Apple Virus was on the prowl but as I read this discussion, it seems that the hard drives are failling and doing so miserably. I am running diagnostics on my iMac and "all is fine". I erased the hard drive with the 7 pass utility and am know reinstaling Leopard. Hope this works.

Unlikely a virus as none has ever existed for Mac OS X that wasn't a trojan horse.

Secondly, with multiple failures in the same household, it sounds like you may have an electrical problem the computers can't deal with.

Please start a new topic here:

http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=1167&start=0

So someone can isolate your problem. You won't confuse the original poster with solutions that won't solve them, and get more people who can try to see what your problem is.

were you using an external seagate harddrive that caused your computer to fail? I have one that i used to get big HD video files from a friend's computer to edit on mine. working with the footage repeatedly crashed my operating system. i had never had that problem before. i gave up and stopped working with the footage. a couple weeks later i tried to wake up my computer from sleep and it was frozen. i restarted it manually and it came up with the gray screen and the folder with the question mark.

I called mac support and they reassured me that i just needed to reinstall my operating system. I had a dvd stuck in the drive and couldn't manually open it. i took it to a mac genius and he said my hard drive was done. I then took it to data recovery specialists and they gave me a new harddrive but could not recover any data.

This morning I plugged in that same hard drive to see if i could mess with that footage again. It didn't even get to the point of opening the finder for the drive and my operating system crashed. I panicked and have vowed not use it ever again, but worry that there may be a virus on there that I have already contracted.

Any suggestions? Are there any free anti-virus software out there that work really well? if not, which is the best pay virus protection?

Please help!

My imac internal seagate Barracuda 7200.9 500g bytes hard drive has just failed & been replaced with a new one after taking into the Chester Apple shop. Who charged me for a new hard drive & labour. I got the imac new in sept 2006 from the Apple store. Some body states on this thread that seagate cover there hard drives with a 3 year guarantee. How do I claim for my cost of replacing from Seagate. Will Seagate recover my data for free from the old drive. This was returned with my imac removed. Thank you for help in advance