I bought two generic hard drives on ubid.com about 1 year ago. Both
are GENERIC (no brand name) 7200RPM, 30GB, made in japan. They both
went dead, basically the same problem, it starts, then you hear noise,
and then spinning slows down. Drive is no longer recognized by bios.
WHAT I AM LOOKING FOR is either: 1. Information where to buy this
drive, or 2. how to fix the problem by myself. (i already sent the
drive to data recovery place and they told me $1500 to recover data -
ridiculous). I did google search myself and only found 1 site that
sells these, overstock.com, unfortunately they are out of stock. Also,
I am including picture to the drive:
http://noip.servehttp.com:777/ebay/front.jpg
http://noip.servehttp.com:777/ebay/back.jpg

Hi Tomek,

Let me start by greeting you a happy New Year. May this be a rewarding
year for you and your family. The following links I've provided can be
conveniently accessed by simply pressing the "Shift" key before
clicking on a link so it will open a new window or right-click on the
link and choose "Open in New Window".

There are many hard disk brands in the market: Fujitsu; Hitachi; IBM;
Maxtor; Samsung; Seagate; Toshiba; Western Digital. Upon examining the
links you've provided, particularly
http://noip.servehttp.com:777/ebay/back.jpg, I was able to identify
the manufacturer of the drives -- Quantum Corp. (
http://www.quantum.com/AM/default.htm ). The big chip with "Quantum"
spelled on it helped me identify the drive. I am not quite sure but
these were probably originally manufactured as OEM drives or the
reseller removed the original label. I know Quantum as the
manufacturer of the fast "Fireball" series hard drives but as I
answered your query, I learned that the company no longer produce hard
drives and instead, concentrated on producing back-up tape drives. The
company merged with Maxtor as mentioned by the link below:

Hard Drive Support
"Effective April 2, 2001, Quantum Corporation's hard disk drive
division completed its merger with Maxtor Corporation. All Quantum
hard disk drive product support and services have been transferred to
Maxtor. For information, warranty, support, rebates, and other
services regarding Quantum hard disk drives, please contact Maxtor's
U.S.A. customer support at 1-800-262-9867 or refer to the Maxtor's Web
site for additional contact and support information:"
(Taken from http://www.quantum.com/AM/about/contact/hard_drive_support.htm)

My further attempt to help you identify the drive led me to one of
Maxtor's Product Support pages. Since you mentioned that your drives
are 7200RPM, 30GB, I surmise that these are OEM Fireball Plus AS. See
the link below:

Maxtor - Product Support Technical Bulletin
How can I determine the model and capacity of my Quantum® hard drive?
https://maxtor.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/maxtor.cfg/php/enduser/olh_adp.php?p_faqid=521&p_created=980202149&p_sid=MF47cayg&p_lva=

Now, since Maxtor is the one handling the product support and services
for Quantum drives, please note that original OEM products of Quantum
are subject to Maxtor's support policy. Please read this link
carefully:

Maxtor - Product Support Technical Bulletin
Warranty guidelines for Quantum® OEM disk drive products
http://maxtor.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/maxtor.cfg/php/enduser/olh_adp.php?p_faqid=157

In my personal opinion, it would be good for you not to look for the
generic drives. It would be a good idea to get a product with warranty
coverage. Please take note:

"The last thing you want is some generic hard drive failing and your
losing all of your data not to mention your whole system will run a
lot slower."

(Excerpted from Totally Awesome Computers -- Dell Schanze’s Guide To
Buying a Personal Computer)
http://www.totallyawesome.com/guide.htm

But I know that the final decision is yours so given the above
information, if you still want to pursue getting the same drives, you
can contact Quantum's authorized distributors to see if they still
have the same specs in stock:

Quantum's Authorized Distributors:
http://quantum.treehousei.com/dealers/distributors_atl.asp
http://quantum.treehousei.com/dealers/distributors_DLT.asp
http://quantum.treehousei.com/dealers/distributors_DLTmedia.asp

You can find more generic drives to buy by clicking the last link of
my search strategy.


Question number two: "how to fix the problem by myself"

The simple and direct answer to your second query is "you can't". Once
a drive fails, you can't do anything to fix it -- it's as good as
junk. Your last action on the matter is to contact a company that
specializes in hard drive data recovery in case you have precious data
that you want to recover. Please be advised that opening the drive
WILL only MAKE MATTERS WORSE. It is highly likely that the data will
be lost forever if you do this because hard drives are very carefully
sealed and airtight. Data recovery companies have the special
equipment and expertise to do the job for you. I have answered a
question on companies that specialize in hard drive data recovery
before, and you can find these companies through this link:

Best source for hard drive data recovery
http://answers.google.com/answers/main?cmd=threadview&id=123371


Search strategy:

quantum "hard drive"
://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&safe=off&q=quantum+%22hard+drive%22

"generic hard drive" buy
://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&safe=off&q=%22generic+hard+drive%22+buy


I hope this helps you. Should you have any comments/questions, please
feel free to post your clarification before rating this and I'll
attend to you as soon as possible. Thanks for asking.

Feilong

Tomek,

I have had a similar problem with one of these drives (except mine was
a 20 gig, and is a "branded" Quantum LCT disk).  The symptoms leading
up to the failure were an apparent increase in error/retries and long
delays in reading/writing data.  The drive then failed completely and
is now not recognized by the BIOS, as in your case.

After performing extensive diagnostics, the best I can determine is
that this is not a hardware problem per se -- the failure is due to a
data error(s) on the drive's Track 0, which contains information that
allows the disk controller to position the read-head at the correct
position on the platter for all other tracks.  So when you power up
this disk, it tries to hit track 0 first, fails, then basically shuts
down.  The bad news is, I haven't figured out a fix.  I'd be very
interested to hear your progress on this issue as I have critical data
on the drive I'd like to recover.  However I can pretty much assure
you that buying a clone drive and swapping parts around will not be
effective.  Anyway, good luck!