gah!!!! power spike, new hard drives knackered.

locutus12

locutus12

locutus12

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i bought an 80 gig seagate drive from MM afew days back, and whilst its been acting a little odd at times it wasnt causing me any problems so i carried on with it, then for a few seconds today all the lights in the house dimmed, since this point my new drive just doesnt work properly at all, if i try to access the drive it locks the system up, it says there is only 27 gigs of files but that theres only 8 gigs of free space ??? and my music folder is now nowhere to be seen, all the music ive made over the last 7 years was in that folder :( its not worth anything but it had sentimental value.

so ive just tried to format it but it says the disk is locked by a process, i cant get into safe mode on account of the faulty disk and the CMD prompt in windows XP isnt too bright and doesnt have many tools :( any ideas?

p.s. i have a surge protector so i dont know how this happened other than perhaps it enhanced a fault in an already faulty drive or perhaps the lack of power caused it to write bad info to the MFT,

either way this is my first failed SEAGATE :( i always hailed them as the most reliable drives that never die.
 
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Well strictly speaking, it hasn't died, just become quite horridly corrupted by the sounds of it. I suggest something like kill disk which will write the drive raw and then get something to write zeros to it. Western Digital's data lifeguard diagnostics for windows has the ability to write zeros so that might be worth a try if you don't want to killdisk it but the WD tool will only work if you can get windows to allow the software to access it, otherwise just a killdisk DOS will be the option.

From the sounds of it, it does seem corrupt but perhaps you can get something back. BEFORE trying the above obviously, run Windows XP setup Recovery console and get chkdsk /p /r running. Good luck!
 
now theres a command i havent used in a good 7 years lol :) will give it a go later, 7.a.m. ... off to bed, oh and i did run checkdisk, it locked, several times... :( with different switches


p.s. i e-mailed the guy i bought it off, (nice bloke, not his fault!!, just one of those things) to ask about the receipt incase i need to R.M.A. it if its still covered. i gave him a discription of the fault which i will write here for you...


"brief discription of the problem...
about a day after i got it i noticed it was quite a noisy drive for a barracuda (i have a 120 gig barracuda also, their the quietest drives you can buy) but as it was still really quiet compared to other drives i didnt think much of it... then i started to have trouble accessing the drive with any real speed, as if it kept on having to wake from sleep mode, which got longer and longer, then today it locked my system up so much to the extent that i couldnt boot into windows with the drive hooked up. i ran norton disk doctor and it told me several key areas of the drive are inaccesable (excuse bad spelling, its 7 a.m.) so i tried low level formatting it outside of XP, got to 53 % after 4 hours and held on 53% for the next hour and a half before i got bored and rebooted. the only way i could get the system to boot up with the drive attached was to remove the file system all together, but obviously this renders the drive useless for storage. now i will say we had a momentary power drop out today which i thought might have accounted for the troubles but then i remembered i am on a surge protector and have an Antec power supply with Active power factor control, so that just about rules that out. "
 
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Your best option is to use Seagates DFT tool (Drive Fitness Tool). This is a little app that you either burn on CD or Floppy and use in true DOS (XP's Prompt is simply a simulated DOS). Just boot into DOS with a Boot CD or floppy and run the Seagate app from their! If anything can fix/repair your Hd then this will be it.
 
As far as I understand Surge Protectors, if it was the power spike that damaged your HDD it should be covered by the SP insurance policy.

They usually quote equipment up to some crazy amount like £5 million coz they're so sure that it won't fail. If it did fail, I bet they'll be mighty annoyed :P
 
I have seen customer's Maxtor drive from an Dell that suffered from a "Brown Out". Would not boot at all, all kinds of data corruption, could not be "fixed". So I purchased a new disk and reinstalled to that.

I then took the 40GB Maxtor away and did a full reformat of the drive. And it has behaved fine ever since. :)

If you are getting bootup problems with the Seagate - then the DOS based floppy tools disks as mentioned above are your best bet. (Assuming you don't need any of the data from that drive....) Once you get a fresf format on that drive, you will probally be fine. :)
 
its just a storage drive, my main drives uneffected, the problem is i have no floppy drive, have not had one for years lol :) gonna have to make an iso of some kind.
 
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