Hello Alex,

My contact tells me that they just took the dead card/PCB off the drive and replaced it with a good one from another drive of the same type. His drive was an MPG3102AH, the cards may not be interchangeable for the different models. My friend has now changed his PC for a different model and the IT folks have taken the machine back with repaired drive still in it.

You might try a Fujitsu distributor or Fujitsu themselves to see if you can get a loan of a good card and get your data off in the same way.

Good luck,

Sid Fewster.

i can see my fujitsu mpg3102at in bios and in startup but when i log in windows 98, nothing appears...
anyone had this problem before?

thanks

JOIN THE CLASS ACTION SUIT!!!!!,
This is clearly a reliability problem, 2 out of the 3 machines I bought with this drive have crashed and the 3rd one is acting up. They should have informed all known customers!!!! I am sure there will be many more drives failing, lets make sure Fujitsu is held accountable. Attached is the law firm's web site

http://www.classactioncounsel.com/fujitsu-litigation.htm

Yep. Mt MPG3102AT just died. It was made in Feb 2001. I updated my son's pc with a new 40G Seagate and brought his drive (the Fujitsu) down stairs and placed it in my Gateway E3100 as a slave. It worked OK that night. Two days later, upon booting the Gateway, "Missing Operating System". That's it. I have spent 4 hours trying different combinations of the jumper settings, just using the drive by itself (I'm an IT support person, have been for 10 years so I'm not really a dork!) and no matter what I do, including getting the Fujitsu DIAG and ERASE files, the gateway refuses to recognise that it exists. Damm!! As I in Australia, I cannot join the Class Action in the US.

Well, I just thought that I would add my $.02 to this discussion. The company that I work for bought 300+ Compaq IPAQ computers a couple of years ago (yeah, mistake #1, I know). Any of those pc's that were in a particular serial number range were loaded and shipped with the MPG3102AT hard drive. The range is "5E13JDVZXXXX". Needless to say, the techs here (including myself) at the company have spent a lot of time and effort to replace these drives. Compaq was doing the replacements for a while, until that particular warranty ran out. So I turned to Fujitsu and they started replacing the drives. And guess what? They were sending me the SAME MODEL IN RETURN! Since then, quite a few of the ones that were sent back to me as replacements have failed, some right out of the box. Now, Fujitsu won't take them. It seems that they have 'changed their policy', and now their warranty says the following:
"FCPA'S Limited Warranty specifically excludes products purchased as a part of a computer system or subsystem".

If anyone would like to complain to Fujitsu, and yeah I went to the Class Action site, you can do the following:
Customer Satisfaction (um, yeah, whatever)
1.800.626.4686
Option 2
Option 1
Option 2
I talked to a dude named Jason, who was really nice (hey, this isn't his fault, he just has to answer the phone). I opened up a case number, and his boss named Lynn is supposed to call me back.

If and when I get any more information, I will try and post it here.

Hi,

I see that I am not the only one with this problem !
I got that problem this morning...with a Fujitsu MPG3204AT-E...after approximately 18 months

Did anybody find a solution to get their data rescured, without the need of passing through a professionnel (too costly...)

If i keep rebooting my machine, is there a chance that the hard drive will be detected ?
If I enter the setting of the hard drive manually in the BIOS, can this work ?

thanks ;-)

One thibg sure, i will never buy another Fujitsu Hard Drive (or product) anymore.....too risky :-D

As soon as this problem came to light many people started all sorts of claims. at least you can put it behind you once you have the data back, at cost maybe. We were unlucky enough to have one of these fuji drives 40GB i believe it was, in the end after some faffing around with fuji techies we sent the drive to http://www.computer-recovery.com it cost a fair bit but all was calm as we had the bloody company login machine back up and running. No thanks to fujitsu though !. sorry to let it all out like this people.

>> it cost a fair bit
Can I ask how much ?
I am juste curious to see the price, to see if it is worth that i send or not my Hard disc to a profesionnel...

I think it was about £750 but then half of it was full of important data, hope that helps.

Thanks
Now, I am sure, it's too costly for my data

Well, i learnt that backups on CD is a very good idea

I baught a new HD - WD400JB - I hope i will not have problems with this one

To be fair you should get your own quote ?
goto http://www.computer-recovery.com

It may not be as costly as ours was.

The quote is a good idea

Anyway, I try to put that story behind me now lol
New Hard Drive, new data

I'm back again after managing to recover data off a friend's Fujitsu MPG3402AT before it died completely and couldn't be recognised by the IDE controller. Didn't get all the data though and have found a UK business at enquiries@fields-data-recovery.co.uk who say they can get the data off quite cost effectively if it is just the chip problem I think they said about UK pounds 50. It does cost more if you want an image of the drive rather than just to copy it off.

Best of luck to all of you with the problem.

Sid Fewster

Here I am in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada with a dead Fujitsu MPG3102AT sitting on my desk. I've already had to buy a new HD (Western Digital this time) and everything I've read here sounds very familiar.

I was happily working on my PC as I had been daily for the past 2yrs since buying it new. Got up, left the PC running, came back an hour later and there was no response from the PC. Screensaver was frozen, the egg-timer mouse cursor was ontop and it was frozen. No keyboard or mouse response. I was forced to hard-boot and, of course, got a "no system disk" error. CMOS wouldn't recognize, nor would a boot disk.

Wish I had seen this site BEFORE all this happened. Would have backed up more of my files (ie digital family photos) before finding a new HD.

On an optimistic note, there are suggestions here that some if not most of the data can be recovered. I've got someone looking into that now.

I think I'll check out the rest of this site for info on the rest of my PCs components. :-D

I don't believe they can get away with this!

We are an IT consultancy. Back in 2001 / 2002 we kitted our office out with Toshiba Equium PCs - and for that matter recommended the same to some of our clients who did the same.

Guess what hard disks were installed ..... no prizes for guessing what's happening to them recently - and at an alarming rate!!!

Thanks for the tip about replacing the on board PCB with a known good one - it does work in some cases, but alas, it seems to vary depending on whether the last instruction to the hardware was to write it off completely!!

Thankfully, the Toshs have a three year RTB warranty, but now I've read the BB, I'm going to check exactly what HDUs have been replaced with Fujitsus - and reject them .... FAST!

Suerely there is some form of recourse on this one? I'm sure my clients would be more than interested to hear!!!

I recently received a Fujitsu MPG3204AT E as part of an "as is" auction on eBay. I was a bit puzzled that it came jumpered as a slave but soon learned that, while it works fine as a slave, my BIOS can't find it when it's jumpered as a master. Perhaps those "defective semiconductors" people have mentioned are in the drive select logic.

I wouldn't bother you with this except for a financial consideration: anyone who has useful files on what used to be a bootable Fujitsu HD might find that he can recover them just by jumpering it as a slave instead of by paying for data recovery.

Best wishes,
jam

Another customer, same drive, same problem. Drive manufactured 03/2001.

Managed to get BIOS to recognise the drive in another machine by removing ALL jumpers - it was then recognised as slave, and I have been able to recover all the data.

One more drive for the rubbish bin - and a mental note to avoid Fujitsu in future.

Yes, I bought a Fujitsu 40 GB- MPG3110 14 months ago here in Japan.
Last week I start having problems booting the computer and finally the hard disk went dead. The bios cannot recognize it anymore.

I lost all my data and Fujitsu refuses to replace the drive because my 1 year warranty has expired.
I think this company is really irresponsible because they have sold this hard drive knowing there was a possibility it could be defective but now they refuse to replace my defective hard drive for a new one

Update: This Fujitsu drive has become progressively less functional over the past week, wasting considerably more than $100 worth of my time. The last straw was a BIOS warning that SMART predicts an imminent failure. I have trashed the drive, rejoicing that everything of value on it I have elsewhere also.

Praise God, from whom all blessings flow!

my friends pc , has been given to me to " sort out " , guess whats wrong , yup , its got a smart warning on it , it will boot at moment , but f1 has to be pressed , the part no is mpg 3204at its a fujitsu 20gb hard drive , after reading the comments , i have " advised my friend " to buy a new drive , another friend , who also " tinkers " with pcs , thinks there is nothing wrong !!!!!! MY QUESTION IS , - IF THE DRIVE IS REPLACED , WITH [MY FAVE] A WESTERN DIGITAL , WILL THE SMART WARNING GO AWAY ? i know this may sound obviuos to some of you techies , but i would like to be certain