My 45GB 75GXP (307045) just died after 8 years of 24/7 operation.
Quite an achivement considering that it was clicking and claking ALL eight years :)))

lol my 45GB 75GXP is still chugging along

IT WON'T DIE!

my first and only deathstar died after less than a year of use. i rma'ed it to hitachi and they sent me a new one. has been running fine for two years now. flakey buggers. keepin the thread alive.

Still have 75GXP that lives. And several 60GXP as well.

Best thread ever?

Never had a deathstar, but I just feel like I have to help contribute to a piece of TR legacy.

Post 1508 and 75GXP legacy still lives on!

I've got a Hitachi DeskStar that just let go.

seagate rocks!!!!!!

I have a 40gb ibm hd. it came in a dell 8100. the warrenty expired 2001, so the drive would not boot in 2001(about 3 months after warenty). I tried my best but just would up getttine a new seagate barracuda, worked just fine, and still is. the funny thing is though, i plugged the ibm behind it aa cavle select and from my comuter was able to access all my files, but sure enogh, it started giving me problems again, in the way that i was using it as the swap file holder (uses a hd like ram, just slower) and my computer flubbed out and slowed to a snail like pace. And i have rd ram, 300 bucks for 126 mb so now im looking for a new computer. The funny thing is, ive reformatted it 5 times and each time, it works for about 40-60 days and then i get these problems. I just recently gave up after reformatting and letting the drive cool for about 5 days, no luck.

I've had two IBM drives, a 14GXP and a 60GXP. The 14GXP is
still going strong after 6 years and a lot of use.

The 60GXP was bought in early 2002. It had the updated firmware. It's been a good drive until the past few weeks when it started making the occasional odd clicking noise.

I was swapping it out onto another system anyway, and backed up
the important directories onto a CD.

The clicking and whirring got worse and in the course of copying files across onto new partitions on the older system the PC hung.
Eventually it was a power-cycled and the drive was recognised, but windows thought the partitions were not formatted.

Tried booting from a Linux rescue disk, which could see the disk and the partition table.

I tried the drive in another machine and sometimes the BIOS could see it and sometimes it couldn't. Eventually, it couldn't see it at all and then it couldn't see anything else on the same IDE channel on either PC.

It sounds like the NVRAM corruption problem.

I tried sticking it in the fridge then trying it, no dice. Maybe if I can get another one - for nothing, I can try swapping the boards. There isn't really anything that's important on it that isn't backed up in some form. If it was got to work again, it couldn't be trusted.

I suppose that 4 years is OK for a consumer market HD and well past the 3 year warranty; you can't trust any hard drive with the sole copy of important data. However, I have always been used to HDs soldiering on to well past the point when their capacity and speed were useful.

I think the next time I'll go for Seagate.

Hitachi is a different company to the one that made the DeathStar,
but I think I'd take a lot of persuading before I buy another drive from them.

please can someone help

i have an ibm 120gb hard drive, it started making those noises click click clikerdy click ones you know, then it stoped booting then stopped spinning, oh no now what, so i bought the same one of ebay,and changed the pcb over and result!!! it spins, with no noise.
But now the thing is suffering a bit of shyness and doesnt want to appear anywere on the pc,including the bios autodetect
the only time i get any evedence of its existence is when i connect it using usb to ide, but it only comes up in the device manager not my computer on xp. ive also tryed fdisk and that cant find it ither.

I am not a member of this forum but would appriciate any advice

thanks matt. mattster501@yahoo.com

I got a DeathStar 60GB (June 2003) which was an RMA of another faulty one, except this one has a little orange sticker on it with "Servicable Used Part" printed on it.

The symptoms started a few months back with the click/whine noises. It did not happen all the time, only sometimes. I thought a few times that it must be one of my CD/DVD drives with a media in it just spinning or something. Never occured to me that it might be the hard drive.

Finally 2 days ago my wife woke me up early in the morning saying my computer is complaining of something (around 8am). Well the motherboard I have tells me something is wrong. It was telling me in a robot voice that the hard drive has problems and a constant click/whine/click/whine/click/whine... The PC was on over night. I don't turn it off often. Every morning at 8am also my AVG virus scan kicks in and does a full scan of the drive.

Anyway, so I stopped the PC went back to bed. When I woke up I took the HD out and did some research online, found this forum, others too and everyone is complaining about the DeathStars.

I also found a sample of the noise my Hard Drive is making.
http://www.dataclinic.co.uk/ibm-deskstar-buffer-corruption.wav
It seems it falls under the "corruped buffer" category.

The scientific explanation can be found here...
http://www.dataclinic.co.uk/ibm-deskstar-hard-disk-drive-data-loss.htm

I really need to recover the data on this Hard Drive. Any ideas/suggestions are pretty welcomed and much appreciated.
Once I recover my data I will use the Hard Drive as fishing weight.

2 things I learned.
-Do constant backups of your valuable data. I had a spindle of blank DVDs and a DVD burner, never bothered to backup my data.
-When you hear any (I mean any) funny noise from anything, there must be a good reason. Diagnose before it's too late.

Here is more details of the HD I have.

Model: IC35L060AVER07-0
Made in Philippines
June 2003

Was running Windows xp
Intel cpu 2.53Ghz , 1GB RAM

Thanks for any info/help you can offer.
kevorkd at hotmail dot com.

Hi all!

I used to run two 180GXP (IC35L120Avv207-0) as RAID 0. One of them is gone now, saying goodbye with that not-so-funny noise of death :(. The drive cant be recognized anymore and the disturbing sound starts with turning the PC on.

(A recording of that noise can be found at:
http://www.computerrepairs.at/Ibm_Festplatten.htm
In my case it has been the second sound.)

I just started to find out if there is any possibility to get my data back. But it doesnt seem to look that good for me....

IC35L040AVER07-0 40 Gb hard disk
Dell Dimension L933r

I guess I'm another deathstar victim. Hard disk (3 yrs old) started making grinding noises a few days ago, next time I tried to boot up windows xp stalled. Windows Repair from install CD and chkdsk /F eventually let me gain access to windows again, but ever since then windows runs tremendously slow as it tries to access (bad sectors?) on the hard disk. Belard advisor (free utility) gave me info about model, type of hard disk in my computer(IC35L040AVER07-0). Googled this information and found out about the problem. Quickly moved all my critical files out. Western Digital Data LifeGuard Diagnostics (another free util)seems to be doing a good job marking bad sectors as I write these lines, but still have to wait till it finishes to see the result. Seems to be time to sing the miserere nobis for my hard disk, I'm not interested in getting a replacement, I don't want to know anything about IBM/Hitachi hard disks ever again.

80.3 GB Deskstar 2002 Drive. Failure on around 10/25/05
E-mail if I can get my money back & data. Mmavin@aol.com

I have (had) a Deskstar IC35L080AVVA07-0 (Thailand) 82.3GB (80GB) that died like a week ago....never had any problems with it until now that is...bought 2002, warranty out in July.
I just sat as usual working with the computer...turned it off...and then later when i turned it on nothing happens and the 'famous' sound appears...
Lucky for me that i didnt have anything important on it...

Originally Posted by Anonymous UK
I have a Deskstar IC35L040AVER07-0
Capacity:- 41.0GB
Manufactured:- Dec 2001 Hungary
I bought the thing in late 2002 and the shop i bought it from no longer exists :( in all the time i have owned it it has been used for a total of just over 300 hours (only used for data storage in a usb 2 caddy for photos etc)

It has now died without warning, it is recognised in the bios (i tried it in the pc ide ports) but that makes little difference as she aint spinning up? I had no warning, no head chatter, the drive was always quite cool (low temps) and i had no warning from my hdd monitoring software that any fault was developing.

I`m shocked that i`ve found all these people with one major problem.. IBM HDD failures :o Well i wish i had have known about the problems with IBM drives before i bought it, but now i know... i will NEVER buy another piece of IBM kit ever again!

A little late, but my IBM drive has just failed, (suddenly). I found this site whilst looking for ideas of how to fix it,

my drive has lasted a good 5 years or more, of fairly constant use in my old laptop, until after a fairly rough car journey it's finally failed...

IBM Deskstar from Thailand, IC35L060AVVA07-0 model 120GXP. It's been "failing" for the past month, although I've been using it for nearly two years. Had no idea that the Deskstar line had so many problems (primarily because it was a Buslink-branded drive, so I didn't know it was an IBM until I opened her up).

Sporadic disk write failures, but SMART said all was well. Today, I was playing music from the drive and it stopped playing, although the click-click-click continued. Shut it down immediately, waited for it to cool down (I've noticed that the drive has been physically hot, and thought this might be part of the problem), and plugged it in again. Spin-up was OK but once I plugged it back into FW (internally it's ATA/IDE), click-click-click again.

Going to try the freezer method, and will report back.
- Mike

PS: If you are writing about your experiences, please include the manufacturer, the location of manufacture, it's model, and family.

Originally Posted by fozzy bear
Hi,

My March 2002 61.4Gb Deskstar (IC35L060AVVA07-0) was made in Hungary, apparently by a robot with fat fingers. It has always run hot and made disconcerting noises, but an extra fan and reassurance from the UK company I got it from put my mind at ease as \"they all do that\"... how ironic.

My computer froze a month ago, then couldn\'t find it on rebooting. Left it, worked fine again. Did this again a week later, which prompted me to put it as slave on another computer and backup the essentials, which also couldn\'t recognise it without the aid of an ice-pack sitting on it for 10 minutes before-hand.

My first bad HDD experience in truth, bought the IBM because I believed them to be super stable. Only looked on the internet today as it has finally died for good, and horrified to see this mass ballsup.

The most cynical thing is that many people have had failures within months of having it, which implies that IBM must have known of the issue pre-2000... obviously they were so busy sending out reconditioned defective HDD\'s the message never reached the Hungarians.

There can only be a single cause of such a large scale problem, does anyone know the root problem?

Good luck to all with a deadstar.

Originally Posted by masser
Sorry, wrong link in previous post. Shall be:

IBM Deskstar Tools:
http://www.opendrivers.com/categorycompany/1375/168/storage-hitachi...

Originally Posted by masser
IBM Deskstar Firmware:
http://www.opendrivers.com/categorycompany/1375/170/storage-ibm-fre...

IBM Deskstar Tools:
http://www.opendrivers.com/categorycompany/1375/170/storage-ibm-fre...

Originally Posted by masser
Use Paragon Partition Manager to Unhide the drive.
And if it needed mount it.

Never ever use Scandisk or similar.

HDD Regenerator can be good to.
The HDD Regenerator can repair damaged hard disks without affecting or changing existing data. As a result, previously unreadable and inaccessible information is restored.
http://www.dposoft.net/#b_hddhid

Good luck!

(see previous two posts)
looked in the device manager and I see the drive, but I can't access the drive from my explorer. When I click on device properties of the drive and populate the volume information, I see status = foreign...partition style = MBR. The rest is all zero. Is a firmware update usefull /i.e. possible??

regards,
Guus.

Today started with good hope to fix the deskstar (see previous post). I've resoldered the contacts on the PCB that make contact with the other part of the drive. No luck there. The harddisk had the same problems as before: it starts spinning, but after 10-15 seconds it stops spinning and the drive is not recognized. Sometimes it even doesn't spin up.

I've tried the drive in a USB casing for IDE/ATA drives and set the drive as master (and to several other options), but it didn't work (with other drive it's ok, so the casing is ok). Tried also freezer spray, but also doesn't work. The drive also doesn't get a chance to run hot. Also tried several jumper combinations.

It's a IC35L080AVVA07-0 (around 80gb) model. Warrenty expired in march 2005 according to the ibm site :-(

Any suggestions are more than welkom.

regards,
Guus.

Hi,

also have an IBM Deskstar. Was dazzled to see that much troublems with the harddisk. The problem occured some time ago. I didn't pay much attention to it. Yesterday I started (i.e. tried) to use the drive again. Once it appeared in windows xp but gave a failure when I tried to read from it. Then the trouble really started. The drive was also not recognized in the Bios anymore. In all those posts I read something about the solder and the contacts of the controller PCB. This evening I've tried to push a little bit on the controller pcb. Now it was (sometimes) recognized in the Bios. I even had it once a minute running in windows XP. Now it just stops spinning within a few seconds whenever I've managed to get the drive started.

Tomorrow I'll fix me a torx screwdriver from my work and will check the soldering on the controller PCB and will probably try to resolder and clean the contacts. If the drive is running, I'll back it up a.s.a.p. and will probably never use the drive again (at least not for data I really need to have safely stored). Never a deskstar for me again.

I'll post again when I've managed to fix the drive (or if if didn't work, but guess my chances are prety good because some mechanice pressure on the controller PCB helped the drive to run for a short period of time).

Really bad engineering if it's true about this lousy contacts.

regards,
Guus.

Thanks for the url. Sadly it didnt help

Originally Posted by masser
Look at this, maybe it helps you.
http://hem.bredband.net/b106202/IBM/contacts1-Cleaning.JPG

My Deathstar 80gb died today and it sucks. Had it for over 3 years so no chance for RMA.
This was my second IBM drive, the first one died too. But this is the last one for sure.

Is it somehow possible to retrieve data from the disk even if it wont show up on boot?