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Third dead hard drive

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i need some help. i built a computer in june mostly with newegg parts (they didn't have my gtx 280 ftx on 6/16 so i had to go to tiger direct and i decided to get my gateway hxd3000 straight from gateway). i have been running a seagate 500 gig drive. the first two lasted almost exactly six weeks before slowly failing and dying a few days later. i just lost my third one last night it appears. it's worked great for about four months how with no trouble. last night i was playing madden 08, watched a dvd, downloaded 8 gigs of video off of our video camera, surfed the web. no troubles all night. turned it on this morning to take madden 08 out before moving the computer and it doesn't detect a hard drive on loading.



newegg has been awesome so far replacing the first two drives, but i'm sure they won't help me out this time. i'm going to have to pay for a fourth hard drive now out of my own pocket again and i'm wondering what is going wrong. they have all been the same drive so i'm hoping it's the drive and not me, but i'm open to ideas of what i might be doing wrong. i don't think my case is too hot as it's huge and has five or six 80mm fans in it. the hard drive is on a cage that holds three drives, but it's the only one in the machine, so it shouldn't be getting to hot from anything around it and nothing else in the machine has had trouble from heat. it's no where near the 1000W psu, the gtx 280 ftw etc.



please help me out. i'm so tired of reinstalling everything. thank goodness i just made it all of the way through fallout 3 and started playing madden 08. took hours to get all of the software installed the last two times though and i'm not looking forward to being computerless for a week again while i wait for a new drive to arrive. i would like this to be the last new drive i have to buy.



what could i be doing that would cause my hard drives to die on me in case it's some error on my part?



thanks.

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checked that out and sent them an e-mail, but i think my third drive arrived some time in mid october and it appears this if just for drives in december.

thanks for the direction though. maybe it will turn something up.

any ways for me do anything else to check my hard drive? right now it won't boot up because it has no hard drive with an operating system or anything running. is there a way for me to diagnosticate my drive to see if it's just fried or if it's something else etc.?

thanks.

axlrose said:
checked that out and sent them an e-mail, but i think my third drive arrived some time in mid october and it appears this if just for drives in december.


Nope, any drive with the faulty firmware is affected regardless of date/place of manufacture. The problem is far more widespread than Seagate is trying to make it out to be.

I'd just get a drive from another vendor, many people are having the exact same issues as you and Seagate has been dragging it's feet in terms of helping the situation. Just today they released their "fix" which consisted of an older firmware with the exact same issue and an updater that doesn't even work.


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axlrose said:
i need some help. i built a computer in june mostly with newegg parts (they didn't have my gtx 280 ftx on 6/16 so i had to go to tiger direct and i decided to get my gateway hxd3000 straight from gateway). i have been running a seagate 500 gig drive. the first two lasted almost exactly six weeks before slowly failing and dying a few days later. i just lost my third one last night it appears. it's worked great for about four months how with no trouble. last night i was playing madden 08, watched a dvd, downloaded 8 gigs of video off of our video camera, surfed the web. no troubles all night. turned it on this morning to take madden 08 out before moving the computer and it doesn't detect a hard drive on loading.


what could i be doing that would cause my hard drives to die on me in case it's some error on my part?



If you're reading and writing to the same drive constantly...there's your problem. Were you playing Madden (gag) while you were downloading from the video camera?

Noya said:
If you're reading and writing to the same drive constantly...there's your problem. Were you playing Madden (gag) while you were downloading from the video camera?


nope, not at the same time, but i didn't realize that would be a problem. you can't use a drive while you are writing to it? i suppose it probably gives you a warning about that when you are about to click 'download' or whatever though so that it doesn't happen.

nope that wasn't the case and it's the first time i've moved any of the videos from the camera to the computer so that wouldn't explain the first two deaths either way.

i did find a firmware update that was apparently released yesterday and i put it on a cd and started the computer with it but then stopped when i got to the screen that said not to have any other sata devices connected and of course the drive with the cd and update on it was a sata device, so i'm trying to figure out a new way to do it without a running hard drive.

Hmmm... Got any buddies with an ide dvd drive? that way you could borrow that person's disk drive, or just put your hdd in their system.

Otherwise, I'd suggest looking into a different manufacturer till Seagate gets their stuff straightened out. I think there is a 500Gb samsung spinpoint f1 on newegg...
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