Seagate + Windows = Death?
(What to do if Windows XP Home/Professional(-suicide-bomber),Vista Home Shit/Business Killer/Ultimate Disaster/Stupidity has died the trillionth time? The Windows version of FreeBSD(Blue Screen of Death)? Are you using Seagate? (No, I’m not totally against Windows or Seagate! Its just fun to make fun like this! But yeah, having successfully tried Ubuntu/Linux-and I love it now- I can very well say I DON’T need Windows or any of its latches!)
Strange but true. Especially if you are an Indian, you might already know this(I said Indian because I’m not sure if the whole world gets the Seagate products from the same place or the third world countries are treated “specially” 
).
Seagate is probably the most popular brand out there, possibly losing the top spot(or has it already?) to Western Digital. As Abhishek says, Seagate has a huge market now and thus they’re losing on quality, and quantity is the only focus now it seems. I personally have been traumatized enough in the last two months, hence this post from this lazy bum. I have a Seagate ST3500320AS, Barracuda 7200.11 SATA 3Gb/s 500-GB 7200 RPM SATA drive. I think I bought it in June or July 2008. I installed Windows Vista Ultimate and it took me 30 seconds(time taken in booting) to admire how good it is. Yes, even now I think it’s pretty neat and cool. With all the effects and ultimate specials, it was like getting freedom from the chains of misery of XP. Also….blah blah(Shit. I get diverted easily.)
(Skip the story and read the problem and solution. However, I think the story might be interesting! )
Stage 1 of death(Lead role: Seagate): Anyway, so as I was saying, I use a Seagate HDD. I have always trusted Seagate. Then came the shock of my life(!). With about 450+GB’s filled with movies, games, critical data(<10GB ), dad’s documents and a lot of other stuff, the hdd one day died. Literally. The drive wouldn’t show up even in the boot menu. I tried many options but only to find that I was phurked. I tried connecting (as secondary) on a Windows 98 machine(LOL!), Windows XP, Vista’s billion variations. Also tried USB casing. Nope. The drive had met its ultimate destiny too early. 
After a while, on a bright sunny day, I installed Ubuntu on another hdd(thanks to Abhishek and others at college). Skipping my first time experience on linux/ubuntu, just let me tell you this: THE HDD WAS THERE AGAIN!(I connected it via usb) However, I could see only 2 partitions of the 5 I had!
I used this tool called TestDisk suggested by Sudhang. AMAZING tool for recovery! It took exactly 1 second to recover and then another second to write the recovered partition table. Boom! I could see all 5 partitions again! ALL 5!
Stage 2 (Windows magic!):
while(!DEAD)
{
I set up the hdd as my first boot device and then Windows Vista was up and running! After about 2-3 minutes of working, Vista started being irresponsive. It didn’t “hang” or “freeze” but nothing was working or “Not responding”-ing either. I restarted and Vista greeted me with BSD. A series of restarts had no change… the same scary BSD!
I ran the recovery console of Windows XP to run chkdsk. It worked.
}
Yes. Windows successfully killed my HDD once again. Now all the partitions were visible(via USB) BUT every folder was now EMPTY! And the files wouldn’t open. Dead. As a stone………………..
Problem:
1. Hard disk crash
2. Damaged boot table/lost partitions
Cause: Windows. Why I’m so sure is first, I was using Windows Vista while the HDD stopped functioning. Then, in the course of recovery, at many stages I tried connecting on Ubuntu and XP via USB and running Vista from the damaged HDD itself. In the latter two, the computer would stop working in a couple of minutes. Also, I lost partitions numerous time on Windows. It seems the way Windows accesses media is weird and it messes up the volumes if it is already messed up. On the other hand, Ubuntu(or Linux or Mac) don’t do this. These don’t unnecessarily access the volumes and hence don’t cause problems.
Solution(s):
1. Try to buy only Western Digital or Samsung hard disks. Seagate has been great, no doubt. But now they’ve many faulty hard drives. I am not the first one. Three of my friends have lost their HDDs(though they got replacements very soon. Still, they lost data and time!) My neighbor has a 500GB too, Seagate. It’s much newer and he too had Vista Ultimate. His HDD crashed much before mine and it’s completely bad now. It crashed a single time and no hint of data ever.
2. (Im saying this as I havent used Windows 7 yet) Use Linux or Apple OS. These have totally different ways of working and probably I wouldn’t have had to face any of this. Well, right now I’m fully able to access all my data, except that one of the partitions isnt perfect anymore. A lot of it has gone bad.(it was a 50GB partition and i can’t read and write some of the files now because it fails to start the action.) Other advantages: no viruses so no anti-viruses, better interface, easy to use OSs….
Comment about your experiences here(and this post!)!! Thanks!
mount_point cannot contain the following characters: newline,G_DIR_SEPARATOR(usually /)
You changed the mount options to “-rw”, “/Local Disk” or something illegal like this and you get the above error when you try to open the partition/drive… Simple solution.
WARNING: Follow the steps as a normal user in terminal. Using root access (sudo or su) might (will?) not work.
1. Open terminal (In Ubuntu, which I use… Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal. It’s a called Konsole in KDE)
2. Type:
$ gconf-editor
3. In the left list pane, go to / -> system -> storage -> volumes.
4. Most probably there’ll be only one entry. If more than one, then select each and right click the “mount_options” key that shows up in the right. Click on “Unset Key” or modify the key to a new value if you want.
I suggest you just unset the key and then first check if you can mount the volume before setting a mew value for the key, by doing this:
$ mount /dev/sdXN
(Here X can be ‘a’, ‘b’ or ‘c’ and N can be a number between 1 and 9. Sample: sda3, sdb4 etc. To know exactly what it is, go to the partition editor of your OS (In ubuntu, type parted or gparted in terminal.). The device should be the one which has no mount point defined(blank). )
Now:
$ mount
This will show you a list of mounted devices. Now try accessing the device.
If it works then great! Now you can experiment with setting up new mountpoints! 
Please comment if this does/doesn’t work. (I’m a noob!)
