Dead 7200.10? And about Seagate's returns..

Emp.Man · 1 Oct 2006 at 12:11

Hi all, having some hard drive troubles and just wanted to make sure that it's the drive that's gone and it's not somehow savable. I've had good luck with HDDs in the past so this is all new to me.

Basically I put a new build together and all looked to be well but the drive seemed to me to be louder than it should be, certainly louder than the four year-old Seagate in my previous system. Bizarrely, it seemed to get louder the further I overclocked my e6600 (which wouldn't go over 370fsb on a P5WDG2 Pro, but that's another story..). After spending all day installing and tinkering I went to make a new partition with Partition Magic for Vista, the PC rebooted to finish it but now Windows wouldn't load, reboting itself on the XP loading screen.

I ran a level 2 test with Spinrite which found unrecoverable sectors, but after doing it XP was loading again - except now occasionally it will freeze up or reboot. Seatools doesn't seem to show any problem, but I ran Spinrite again - on level 5 this time - and although it showed no unrecoverable sectors this time it did come up with nearly 2 million seek errors.

This could be normal for all I know, so is the drive definitely borked? I don't want to go through the process of returning the drive if it's just going to come back with them saying it's fine, just a file system error or whatever. And if so, does anyone know if I'd be better off returning it to Seagate or to OcUK?

Thanks a lot

Participant · 1 Oct 2006 at 13:25

Have you another SATA cable you can try?

Emp.Man · 1 Oct 2006 at 13:29

Yep, I can give that a go when I get back to where the PC is. Can a dodgy cable cause those sort of problems?

Participant · 1 Oct 2006 at 13:32

Not sure about the noise but can certainly cause read errors. The noise as you say is weird cause it got louder the further you took the E6600?? Unless the noise increase was just coincidentally in line with the overclocking.

Emp.Man · 1 Oct 2006 at 13:36

Yeah, it's strange but that's what it seemed to be doing. If I took the e6600 back to stock it'd quieten down a lot, but still be fairly noisy. I have wondered if there might be more to it because of it seeming to do that, along with the fact that I can't get a very good CPU overclock with a board that's supposed to be very good for it, I've got a Scythe Infinty on there too.

Emp.Man · 1 Oct 2006 at 22:57

Had in on for an hour with a different cable and using a different SATA port, it's just as noisy as ever. Doing a Windows search for example it's far noisier than my old Seagate has ever been, I doubt the fact that the old one was in a Sonata would make that much difference. I'll run Spinrite on it later but I'd be willing to bet it'll still be giving me all those seek errors.

So, does anyone have any idea on the best way to RMA it?