Time to RMA the drive?

[brakeinup]

I have two Maxtor 250gb SATA drives in my system (not RAIDed). Over the last few days XP has been pausing on boot with the XP logo and progress bar active for anything up to 4 minutes.

It will eventually get into windows and allow normal operation. If I check the System log it reports that an error was detected on hard drive 0.

The system runs fine after it has got in to windows and it does not pause everytime I boot the system.

This looks like a bad sector has been detected. Do the drives self repair (maintenance track) or should I RMA the drive ASAP?

 

[Dr_Evil]

try emptying the drive and performing a low-level format, or zero-fill. Then re-format the drive in windows and put ** files back, see if it happens again. If it does RMA it.

 

[brakeinup]

Thats a good idea! I will image the drive first though.

Can you recommend a low level format tool that would run from windows? I plan to image the drive in my wife's PC and do the format from there.

 

[Cody]

Try running Power Max from www.maxtor.com it will give you an error code if the drive is faulty - making it easier to get a RMA Power Max also claims to fix faulty sectors but I would always run it again afterwars as i usually get a failure afterwards

 

[muckymick]

I built a system over christmas with one of these in and have had problems with it not booting,its recognised in the bios but just blackscreens before windows comes up.Went in to o/clockers and bought another one this morning and put that in the machine and it booted up straight away and formatted etc.First one will be going back to the shop next weekend.Assistant in the shop said they don't have much trouble with them but i have noticed a few threads about them now,one with the same problem as me.Won't use them again !!