Found Bad Sectors

If SeaTools has found bad sectors it will have marked them as such so that they're not reused so in theory the drive should be fine although the discovery of bad sectors is quite often the precursor to bigger issues. Whether you'd be able to RMA the drive now is something I'm not sure about but it might be worth sounding out Seagate to find their replacement policy.

I'd certainly be keeping an eye on the disk though, make sure you've got backups of anything important and run Seatools on a regular basis.
 
I am in the process of RMA'ing my drive at the moment because I found quite a lot of bad sectors on my drive.

Don't know whether Seagate will process the RMA though, just have to wait and see.

I am finding it hard to make sense of the packaging you have to use, it seems rather pedantic: http://partners.seagate.com/help/rms/legal_agreement/index.html

Could anyone tell me how i should be packaging the drive?

Thanks.
 
Sorry to hijack the thread, are bad sectors not something companies let you RMA a drive for. What do they let you RMA it for then?!! Total drive failure?
 
manoz said:
Sorry to hijack the thread, are bad sectors not something companies let you RMA a drive for. What do they let you RMA it for then?!! Total drive failure?

Depends if the drive is new I would probably send it back. But if you've had it a while and only a few are flagged ie 34k I wouldn't worry about it. Only once you get several megabytes I would return it or throw it in the bin.
 
squiffy said:
Depends if the drive is new I would probably send it back. But if you've had it a while and only a few are flagged ie 34k I wouldn't worry about it. Only once you get several megabytes I would return it or throw it in the bin.

Well mine, i can't zero the drive and I can't install windows, so I assume that it would be ok to RMA it.

I did have quite a few bad sectors i think.
 
squiffy said:

Hi

Sorry to bring this up again, still haven't bothered to RMA the drive, but I just wanted to know if there are any other tools apart from seatools i can use to check the Drive as the checking runs extremely slowly, something to do with NF4. After an hour it was still on 0%.

Also does that mean 34 thousand sectors? Cause I only came across a few 20 odd when i left it on for 1 hour, but it was still 0%.

As a measure, I couldn't zero the drive because of the bad sections (using mhdd).

Should I RMA or will i have to leave Seatools on for like forever.

Can I run seatools in windows, will it be faster?

Thanks.
 
Modern hard drives have spare sectors, and should always be free of bad sectors. If a new bad sector appears its normally a sign that the drive is failing.

Doing a zero fill, or running the drives diagnostics 'should' remap any new bad sectors into the spares, if the disk is very bad it will eventually run out of spares.

Once the drive has no more spare sectors its pretty much toast imho, and time for RMA. Some drives will remap during a zero fill, others need their diagnostics software run for the full cycle.

Perhaps you can plug the drive into another computer to run the diagnostics if the NF4 is causing it to be slow.
 
Conrad11 said:
Hi

Sorry to bring this up again, still haven't bothered to RMA the drive, but I just wanted to know if there are any other tools apart from seatools i can use to check the Drive as the checking runs extremely slowly, something to do with NF4. After an hour it was still on 0%.

Also does that mean 34 thousand sectors? Cause I only came across a few 20 odd when i left it on for 1 hour, but it was still 0%.

As a measure, I couldn't zero the drive because of the bad sections (using mhdd).

Should I RMA or will i have to leave Seatools on for like forever.

Can I run seatools in windows, will it be faster?

Thanks.

It running slowly could also indicate more serious problems (ie the drive really struggling to read/write), issues caused by motherboard chipset notwithstanding. Anyway, yes you can often use other drive manufacturer drive diagnostics on drives. You might try Hitachi's DFT (orwhatever it's called) or perhaps Maxtor's Maxblast. Most of these types of diag programs need low level hardware access to properly diagnose the disks, so for that reason typically cannot/won't run inside windows, where they'd not be able to access the hardware directly.

You could also of course download one of the liveCD/rescueCD's with disk checking software and try that (but that's more complicated/involved I suppose.)
 
Ok basically, I am going to RMA the drive this week (finally), but according to Seagate there is very strict packaging details and I was wondering if I could just stick it in a box with a bit of foam and an antistatic bag and send it?


Seagate RMA Rules

If that doesn't work then this PDF:

http://www.seagate.com/support/service/pdf/pack.pdf

Looking at the pdf above they can't seriously expect everyone to ship it like that?

Has anyone here RMA'ed a Drive to seagate? What packaging did you use?

Thanks.
 
If you have a normal hdd box with padding then send it back in that. The last few drives I rma'd were sent in a normal hdd box with the padding, but the drive i recieved back was only protected by 4 blocks of plastic on each corner.

Odd how they expect you to rma the drive in a special way, yet send you a drive back the cheapest way possible!
 
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