SeaTools Full Format fails (ST3000DM001), everything else passes?

PaulM

PaulM

PaulM

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Joined
18 Feb 2008
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1,046
Hey,

I have a 4 year old Seagate ST3000DM001 (3TB), I know they have a relatively high failure rate but it's only used as a secondary backup.

I wanted to reuse the drive for something else but before doing so decided to do a full format in SeaTools to check the drive is still OK... but it failed. The drive passes SMART checks, short DST, long DST but every time I try to format it with SeaTools it fails at seemingly random locations (between 5%-30%), I can still format it in Windows.

Has anyone else experienced this with SeaTools, is it likely to be the drive failing or just SeaTools messing up?
 
Hey there, PaulM.

That's a bit strange indeed. If I were you, I'd retest the drive with a 3rd party diagnostic tool, just to double-check and make sure that everything is fine with it. You could also try it out with a different SATA port and different cables as well.
Basically, if you see nothing alarming after testing the drive again, you could get in touch with the tool developer's customer support and ask for more info on the subject, to see if the guys there can explain what might be causing this.

Hope that helps. Please let me know how it goes.
Boogieman_WD
 
Thanks for the reply Boogieman. I tried different SATA ports/cables but SeaTools still fails to format it. Today I let HDDTune run a full error scan on the drive and it didn't find any problems/bad blocks, then did a full format via Windows Disk Manager which just completed successfully.

As far as I can tell the drive is functioning fine, I'll try to get in touch with the SeaTools developers to see if they can offer any extra insight, the software itself doesn't even give me an error code/msg in the log it just reports "FAILED".
 
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I see. Well, it really sounds like the drive is in a good condition, since you've reconfirmed that with a 3rd party tool as well and nothing alarming came up. It might be a software bug of some sort. You could give it a try with a different version of that program.

At least everything seems to be OK with the HDD. :)
 
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