Yep, add another angry/frustrated FUJITSU MPG3102AT victim to the list. I just wasted a whole day and night messing around with Anti-virus recovery, CD/FD recovery methods then in desperation whille looking for the manufacturers spec came across this forum. It made me feel better and worse at the same time - better knowing that this is a widespread problem and unlikely to be a virus, but worse knowing that an irresponsible, incompetent and customer-unfriendly company FUJITSU can manufactur and distribute time-bombs like this!!!

Since FUJITSU are disinterested in customer satisfaction, we all owe it to ourselves and the next 'sucker' who will end up with one of these lame products to 'vote with our feet'. Tell as many people as possible to avoid FUJITSU - viral email can be powerful and can create a lot of goodwill for companies the deliver excellence. Hopefully the economic impact and consequences will discourage such indifference from companies such as FUJITSU who can't be bothered to fix up problems they have created.

Sorry for the vitriol - a very angry and unhappy EX - FUJITSU customer who will never buy any product that bears the brand name FUJITSU (search engines - come & get it - FUJITSU )

I'm a bit annoyed at myself for not finding this site sooner. I've wasted so much time on my MPG3102AT.

Thankfully I was able to access and transfer my data when my drive (which by then was installed as slave) suddenly reappeared for a day.

I noticed Fujitsu is offering a firmware upgrade. I found this tonight when I did a Google search for "Fujitsu MPG3102AT". I was wondering if anyone else has tried this upgrade and if so, have they had any results?

Good luck

Well seeing as this thread is dropping into my inbox almost weekly now... yep, I've tried the firmware upgrade and for me it was about as effective as a fart in a spacesuit. A few lucky souls further up the thread have had joy fiddling with the master/slave jumpers or swapping the controller PCB (a tricky job). As for me, I'm waiting for someone to invent a time machine so I can go back to 2001 and backup my data...

Definetly dump the Fujitsu drives they are presently waiting to crash and Fujitsu will not just take the label as proof, therefore you have to send them a drive with all your lost data, that might include financial areas, Bank PIN#s, phone numbers , personal information, your passcodes and many other personal things.

I will never buy another of there products!

I presently have a 40 gig that does not spin and 15 gigs of data unrecoverable or costly to recover, and a 10 gig that will be replace with a quality hard drive.

Denny

anyone have the same problem but with a Fujitsu MAN3184MP ?

Never heard of any problems with their SCSI drives - as I mentioned way back when, I've been running a pair of MAJ3184MPs for 2 years now, and they've run perfectly. I've recommended their SCSI drives to other people too, and I've yet to have any complaints.......

GM

********

Never heard of any problems with their SCSI drives - as I mentioned way back when, I've been running a pair of MAJ3184MPs for 2 years now, and they've run perfectly. I've recommended their SCSI drives to other people too, and I've yet to have any complaints.......

GM

********

To know more about the great Fujitsu fiasco have a look at:

http://www.sheller.com/fujitsupress.htm

Just a Q for me and any other dummies out there.

How long is an average hard disk supposed to last anyway?

Is there a standard minimum I can expect?

Ta

Try installing the HDD in another PC, but do it with other disk (containing ghost or another program to clone it), in a differnt IDE, is very probably that the HDD works, for a few time, but enought to save your data.

I tried a lot of ways, that works fine to me, i only lost mi HDD but no my data. uff

Fujitsu says:
Fujitsu is actively addressing an issue with some MPG Series and MPF-AH Series desktop hard disk drives.

Fujitsu has received a number of claims regarding some of these drives, which we believe are due to a problem with a chip manufactured by a sub-supplier. The chip in question was packaged using a plastic compound containing inorganic, phosphorus flame retardant.

Fujitsu is working with OEMs, distributors, and end-users to whom we sold product directly to provide warranty protection for these desktop hard disk drives. We have replaced drives that have failed.

This matter is the subject of litigation. While we do not comment on pending litigation, we note that while Fujitsu did not manufacture the chip, we are taking action to protect our customers and users of the products we sell.

Fujitsu exited the desktop hard disk drive market more than a year ago to focus on mobile and enterprise hard disk drives. The mobile and enterprise products use different components and are not affected by this issue.

As always, users are advised to back up computer files, a practice that makes sense for any type of data storage.

December 17, 2002
Source: http://www.fcpa.fujitsu.com/products/hard-drives/hd-public-statment.html

new tip: Do not connect the HDD untill 1 day passed.
after, your HDD will start, but a little time.
an then you only have a expensive paperweight

I put my MPG3102AT into the freezer for an hour and it started working after that.

I recovered 8GB of data.

In 2000 year In Latvia Fujitsu sells with 3 year warranty.
It was great deal. Most of resellers, as I am, bout a lot of them. And as I know almost all of 10GB and 20GB are failed in this 3 years. I change approximately 95% of all Fujitsu HDDs. I don't know any one who would place Fujitsu after that.
It stops working in hot days. We have a joke that in Asia is so cold, so they do not need to worry about heat problems.
(Asian people please do note take it close to the heart, this is just a joke No one whants to harm You.)

Radix ! mentioned this in an earlier comment on the Fujitsu Hard Drive in second paragraph. I wonder myself if by packaging the comment refers to the IC plastic case or some other packaging? If phosphorus flame retardant was around when the chip was installed on the onboard drive control board could we be talking about a simple cold solder joint, if so could this perhaps be bypassed or fixed? Which chip on the 40 gig hard drive is affected and does anybody have a schematic of it???

"Fujitsu has received a number of claims regarding some of these drives, which we believe are due to a problem with a chip manufactured by a sub-supplier. The chip in question was packaged using a plastic compound containing inorganic, phosphorus flame retardant."

My little contribution ... our department has also apparently had a number of failures of this exact drive (no stats, sorry).

I've just managed to get my colleague's drive to work (at least enough to retrieve her documents and data), by plugging the drive into IDE port 0 (master, only drive on the system), booting with a WIN98SE floppy, and doing fdisk /mbr at the command prompt.

This assumes of course that your bios is recognising the drive, and that it spins up normally - evidently the problem in this case was that the master boot record got corrupted somehow.

The drive is now behaving badly - I've tried copying the whole drive, it stops on one file and then each time I try to access the drive again it says the drive is unformatted. However, a restart gets things back to normal. Might just be a corrupted sector though, I'll have to do a full scandisk.

Seems like the class action is justified - there's something seriously wrong with these drives, and hundreds of thousands of people must have lost data because of them. I and my colleague just got lucky, I think.

BTW, if the fridge/freezer trick has worked for some people, that means that there may be bearing problems on the spindles too.

I had a failed MPG3204AT with the same symptoms mentioned here. I emailed Fields Data Recovery from a link on this site and recovered all my data to a new drive, and even sent me back my Fujitsu in working order. The drive has failed again, but my data is ok

I encountered the similar problem with my MPG3409AT, and spent three sleepless days searching the web for the solution.
There are several companies around the world that can fix it for you for 350 U$ and more, but I eventually got mine hard drive up and running long enough to recover the data by myself. I am not saying it will work for everybody, but if your hard drive is not recognized by the BIOS yet otherwise seems running OK,
and this is your last hope, please describe your particular situation,
in your reply.
Good luck

Petr

The problem affects the MPG and MPF series drives from 10GB to 40GB.

see http://www.ptech.co.nz/recovery/fujitsu_mpg.html

Swapping controller card is not usually succssful due to the nature of the problem. WIth the correct facilities most drives can be recovered.

If you have one of these drives, then I suggest that you backup your data regularly and return it under warranty as soon as bad blocks start to appear, or the drive is sluggish in being recognised at start up, or rubbish characters appear on start up.

Alan

Hello Everyone.
I was very frustrated for few days that my MPG3204AT wasn't detected by BIOS. Trust me! I have tried everything. put HD to freezer for 30 minutes, I even bought Hard Drive Machanic US$69.99 to fix this.. which didn't help at all.
NOW!! Try this.. It worked.. YAHOO!!
http://www.fujitsu.ca/download/hdd/gen_upgrade101.exe
*** It only works for MPG3102AT or MPG3204AT
Make sure you are following the instruction.
1. You need formatted floppy to start with.
2. After downloading put floppy into A drive. Excute gen_upgrade101.exe.
3. Turn off computer after the process.
4. Put MPG3102AT or MPG3204AT into your computer (I did with Cable Select), insert the floppy and Turn on the computer. It will boot A drive and fix your hard drive (of cause you have to follow the instruction).
5. Take floppy out turn off (DO NOT RESET) computer.
6. install second hard drive.
7. Turn on the computer.
8. Back-up all the data from MPG3102AT or MPG3204AT to Good Hard Drive.
9. Turn off your computer and uninstall (remove) MPG3102AT or MPG3204AT from your computer.
10. Out the front door and leave MPG3102AT or MPG3204AT on the middle of your drive way.
11. Drive over MPG3102AT or MPG3204AT with your Hummer at least 10 times.
12. Throw it away. It is Piece of JUNK!!
I spent over 30 hours on this CRAP.
NO MORE FUJITSU

Good Luck, hope this works for you as well.

Hello Everyone.
I was very frustrated for few days that my MPG3204AT wasn't detected by BIOS. Trust me! I have tried everything. put HD to freezer for 30 minutes, I even bought Hard Drive Machanic US$69.99 to fix this.. which didn't help at all.
NOW!! Try this.. It worked.. YAHOO!!
http://www.fujitsu.ca/download/hdd/gen_upgrade101.exe
*** It only works for MPG3102AT or MPG3204AT
Make sure you are following the instruction.
1. You need formatted floppy to start with.
2. After downloading put floppy into A drive. Excute gen_upgrade101.exe.
3. Turn off computer after the process.
4. Put MPG3102AT or MPG3204AT into your computer (I did with Cable Select), insert the floppy and Turn on the computer. It will boot A drive and fix your hard drive (of cause you have to follow the instruction).
5. Take floppy out turn off (DO NOT RESET) computer.
6. install second hard drive.
7. Turn on the computer.
8. Back-up all the data from MPG3102AT or MPG3204AT to Good Hard Drive.
9. Turn off your computer and uninstall (remove) MPG3102AT or MPG3204AT from your computer.
10. Out the front door and leave MPG3102AT or MPG3204AT on the middle of your drive way.
11. Drive over MPG3102AT or MPG3204AT with your Hummer at least 10 times.
12. Throw it away. It is Piece of JUNK!!
I spent over 30 hours on this CRAP.
NO MORE FUJITSU

Good Luck, hope this works for you as well.