new hard drive... dead?

  • Thread starter Thread starter emad
  • 4 comments
  • 446 views
emad

emad

Messages
5,622
Messages
eMadman
I built my pc just a few weeks back and the hard drives were fine. Last night, I don't know what happened. The computer shut down just fine, but my windows boot.ini was missing. Trying to fix that didn't help either. So I went in and ran a thorough scandisk and found bad sectors. Cleaning those and rebuilding boot.ini helped, but now my PC won't boot into windows at all. After a thorough dig through the contents of the drive (using BartPE), I found that MANY critical folders (including my entire user account) were in the bad sectors that scandisk found. All of them are sitting in a bunch of randomly named folders that scandisk created to recover them.

I know I have to reformat, but should I RMA the drive? How long do you think that process would take with Seagate? I find it worrysome that a brand new drive died like this on me. Even more worrysome that I have an identical 2nd drive from what I assume is the same lot. It's loaded with some fairly important files.

Any suggestions? I've had my pc running SpinRite for the past 9 hours to do an extensive surface scan of my C: drive and so far it's 74% complete and needs 3 hours till it's done. I can't really make sense of the SMART information it's giving me though.. The major area where I see problems is the error count @ 40,322,053 ECC corrected, and 1,271,459 seek errors. Under Margin, it shows ECC corrected at 69 out of a 70 max.
 
take it back to where you got it from. a new drive should NOT die that early even one that has been abused to hell.
 
It's not exactly dead, it just has bad sectors on it. It worries me because I don't want to have another crash like this when I have 100+ gigs of data on it.

As for returning it where I bought it, it can't be done. I had a relative order the drives through the wholesale supplier he uses for his business - that's all in California which is on the other side of the continent and in another country from me. I have to do the RMA straight through Seagate
 
I had to RMA 2 Hard drives to Seagate. The process took about 2 weeks, from initial request until I got them back. Then again, I didn't send it in straight away. I was busy and had to wait 3 or so days.

I would suggest thuroughly scanning your second hard drive. I doubt it too would be bad, but you're better safe than sorry.
 
i've had 3 seagates fail from that same problem after a few months{1st was in a packard bell that was really old like circe 1994 i think,second was a replacement that lasted 6 months and the 3rd i think lasted till 98}

i bought a maxtor 80 that was DOA in the box.took it out of the box,hooked it up and fired the computer up,just a blank screen{this was building a new rig with a new motherboard that would have no problem with it}

i returned it and got an 80 gig Western Digital SE at best buy,no problems.
 

Latest Posts

Back