Problem with fairly new sata drive

[jake0]

Hey guys,

I've been having the weirdest problem with one of my sata drives.. basically it was working fine last night, and has been working fine for about 4-5 months, then suddenly this morning it's been causing windows (xp) to get stuck on the load screen. The screen doesn't freeze, but that little blue bar just continues to go across and across etc.

I've tried unplugging everything, and testing each bit of hardware one by one, until I realised it was that sata drive. I also tested it in another pc and it does the same thing to windows (vista this time)

Windows isn't install on this drive, it's a separate storage drive with no partitions and a 500gb maxtor. It's around 4-5 months old.

Any ideas what's wrong? Or how to fix?

Thanks for your time.

 

[cmichael258]

You can download and run Seagate Seatools to see if the drive has bad sectors:
http://download.seagate.com/seatools/registration.nsf/d_file_return?openform

 

[jake0]

That'd be my next step I guess, problem is I can't boot up windows with it plugged into to the mobo. If it's plugged in windows wont load, if it's unplugged windows loads fine...

 

[shades]

Check your power supply. I had the same problem on a machine a few weeks ago and it turns out that the drives were drawing too much power from one rail of the power supply. Originally I thought the drive had went bad, but when I put the new drive in the computer wouldn't post at all. I shifted the power connectors around to spread the load accross the different rails and it worked fine. For my situation it was the power supply going bad, might be the same in your case.

 

[jake0]

Cheers for the reply shades, but not sure if it's the same for me, unluckily, as I've tried it on it's own, so with no other HD using that rail, just to check if I could enter the bios at all etc.. but still hangs, plus it did the same in another computer.. with a different power supply, so looks like it could be screwed..

Anyone know of any decent hard drive scanning/fixing software that can be booted from disk?

 

[roadrunner197069]

Seagate, enough said. Their Quality is **** this year. I had 5 drives from them this year and everyone died.

 

[Guest]

Agreed. Seagate drives are absolutely brutal in the 7200.11 series. But that said, I had the same exact problem but was able to restore the drive to 100% working with all data. You need to connect to the drive with a serial transmitter and reset the BUSY state of the firmware. Google "HD Doctor for Seagate" or PM me if you still want to restore/repair this drive.