As I didn't care about the hardware, but did about my data, I asked for the pricing of data recovery. The amount per GB was shockingly high, so I decided to cancel my ticket, not willing to pay such amounts, but also not willing to risk loosing my data.
My father happens to have a set of the same barracuda disks in his machine. After 14 months of use, one failed with exaclty the same symptoms as my disk (spins up fine, but the machines bios can detect it anymore, not in USB case, or different machine under DOS or Linux either ) He calls in, and is told this is likely a firmware issue. So UPS comes to pick up his disk, and returns it working fine 3 days later....
So I decided to email Seagate support, explained the above, and ask if they can try the same trick. I didn't know if my warranty was still valid, ( this disk is in my desk drawer for allmost a year ) but they didn't make any issue about it, and I promptly got a UPS shipping label to send my disk to their repair labs.
And happy joy, today I received my disk back working fine, with all data !!
All my precious gigabytes of textures, MP3's, my sims, OAR's IAR's all in perfect shape. You can imagine me smiling I recon.
Now I should be upset that a firmware issue seriously gave me a royal headache and made me start from scratch, but I'm way too happy to have all my stuff back. So I wrote a nice email to the support people, with a big "thanks", and am now making backups. On USB, firewire, and in the cloud. Once done i'm going to try and figure how to migrate all the SQL data, upgrade it to 7.x standards, and how to get my "old" sims back alive, before i wil back it up again....
Anyways, luxury problems. For now Foxx has Happy days.
