Bad Sectors on a 11month old Maxtor harddrive...

NeilF

NeilF

NeilF

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So my mum's PC (a prebuilt system from OCUK) refused to boot up etc etc. Anyway, I plugged it into a different SATA and messed around in the BIOS and then it finally decided to boot up...

It did a check disk and complained about a few things. If I do a checkdisk now it reports 20K of bad sectors...

Not had bad sectors on a hard drive for a loooong time, so how should I approach it on this 11 month old HD? Return or not?
 
NeilFawcett said:
So my mum's PC (a prebuilt system from OCUK) refused to boot up etc etc. Anyway, I plugged it into a different SATA and messed around in the BIOS and then it finally decided to boot up...

It did a check disk and complained about a few things. If I do a checkdisk now it reports 20K of bad sectors...

Not had bad sectors on a hard drive for a loooong time, so how should I approach it on this 11 month old HD? Return or not?
Click to expand...

If possible make a backup, on your other system, do a full format and see if that fixes it, if not then return it and get a new one under warranty.
 
sandeep said:
You can never know you can still give it a try if not then you will definitely get a refurbished one back from seagate. Well I got a seagate one back when I sent it.
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*sigh*

OK... More time wasted :(

God I hate computers!


I'm sitting here at home with five devices using about 7 harddrives... Not on issue for as long as I can recall...

But in my mums PC, bang :(
 
Ive only had three HDD fail on me, and all three were Maxtor......

Seagate have got a good RMA system but as said earlier they send you a refurbished Seagate model, which to be fair the one i got seems okay.

Go on their website and download their diagnostic tool and see what that says, but sadly it does mean more messing about!
 
MikeRossyBoy said:
Ive only had three HDD fail on me, and all three were Maxtor......

Seagate have got a good RMA system but as said earlier they send you a refurbished Seagate model, which to be fair the one i got seems okay.

Go on their website and download their diagnostic tool and see what that says, but sadly it does mean more messing about!
Click to expand...

So you recon just download the Maxtor diagnostic tool from Seagate? What might that highlight of use?
 
NeilFawcett said:
So you recon just download the Maxtor diagnostic tool from Seagate? What might that highlight of use?
Click to expand...

Yeah download seatools

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/seatools

It will just run checks to see what is really wrong with the drive I think, I never really used it on my previous Maxtor and just sent it to seagate.

I had a 500GB Maxtor HDD 7200rpm, 32mb cache and that gave up on me, I kind of blame BSOD's during overclocking, and well I sent the drive back and seagate sent me a Baracudda 7200.11 back, I would think of it as an upgrade :)

They processed the whole RMA in about a week I think.
 
dmxdex2020 said:
Only HDDS ive had fail on me is maxtor.
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+1 and after never bought a Maxtor drive again, just went with reliable Western Digital, the Hitachi drive I have it very good as well, I picked it up from PC World when my Maxtor gave up on me and I needed a HDD to use my system lol so for about 2 years it's been running fine :)
 
Craig321 said:
If it gives an error code then they will replace it, quickly as well.

My >1 year old 1.5TB backup died on me, had a brand new one back in about a week.
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OK! Ta!

I'm sort of hoping there isn't an error and my mum can just live with it as is, rather than me spending (wasting) hours and hours changing a hard drive!
 
Hdd failures (imo) happens regardless of brand.

I had 2 seagate drives fail after about 4 years within a few months as well as having a samsung drive 3 months after being bought.
 
I've had 2 Maxtor drives and they both failed one of them after only a year of moderate use. This was before the Seagate thing though. Luckily the data was recoverable by re-installing Windows on a new drive and copying the data off. It eventually failed completely and was unrecognisable by BIOS.

Once I replaced them with a good quality brand I opened them up and saw that the heads had grounded on the platters.
 
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NeilFawcett said:
Is a full format going to get rid of "bad sectors"?
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Full format can "mask" the bad sectors if they are just "weak", if the format passes the bad sectors will come back later.

But there is a tool on the ultimate boot CD that will scan for weak sectors and force the hard drive to remap them. IDE and SATA hard drives all come with quite a lot of spare sectors, and normally they will get remapped automatically.. but sometimes the drive wont detect them and they end up as bad sectors.

You could check the "SMART" data and see if there are any spare sectors left for remap, if the spare pool has been used up already then quickly RMA the disk before the warrenty runs out. If there are plenty of spares left, download the ultimate boot disk, and use the repair tools.

Did it recently on a laptop hard drive, 27 bad sectors which were causing a right mess of W7, an hour later, they were remapped, and the disk still showed full capacity with no errors :).
 
Ran the "short test" and it failed on the Maxtor... Worked on the (other) Samsung in there...

Guess that's a bad sigh?
 
Corasik said:
Full format can "mask" the bad sectors if they are just "weak", if the format passes the bad sectors will come back later.

But there is a tool on the ultimate boot CD that will scan for weak sectors and force the hard drive to remap them. IDE and SATA hard drives all come with quite a lot of spare sectors, and normally they will get remapped automatically.. but sometimes the drive wont detect them and they end up as bad sectors.

You could check the "SMART" data and see if there are any spare sectors left for remap, if the spare pool has been used up already then quickly RMA the disk before the warrenty runs out. If there are plenty of spares left, download the ultimate boot disk, and use the repair tools.

Did it recently on a laptop hard drive, 27 bad sectors which were causing a right mess of W7, an hour later, they were remapped, and the disk still showed full capacity with no errors :).
Click to expand...
Will Ultimate Boot Disk leave the data intact? I'm looking for the least amount of work here.

ie: If I RMA the disc it means formatting, ghosting etc etc...
 
Hmm... Brought the drive home and plugged it into my machine. Reformated it (quick) and now it's right as rain? Seatools (on my machine passes it)!

Hmm...

So I guess I can't send it back now!?



EDIT: A Long Self Disc Test just failed!!!
 
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