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Old February 15th 06, 02:28 AM posted to comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage
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Default Seagate Barracuda 160 GB IDE becomes corrupted. RMA?

On Tue, 14 Feb 2006 18:13:29 -0500, "J. Clarke"
wrote:

an_Musicant wrote:
:
: Part number: ST3160023A-RK
:
: Bought 08/13/2004 online at outpost.com, and it still has almost 4 years
: on the warranty. I've never lost a HD before, although I RMA'd one that
: was getting bad sectors 6 months after purchase. I've had over 10 HDD's.
: This was working perfectly, AFAIK and suddenly a couple of days ago
: Windows 2000 doesn't see the drive (Explorer). Disk Management shows it
: online but unformatted. So, I suppose the partition table became
: corrupted. Is this an automatic RMA? Can it be assumed that it's a
: hardware issue? Is it possible for me to retrieve the data somehow? Or
: is that an expensive and/or iffy proposition? Of the 3 HDD's in the
: system, this was the most expendable in terms of the data. In that I was
: extremely lucky. I used it mainly for backup and temporary work.
:
: Thanks for any info.
:
:There is a diagnostic utility on the Seagate site, download it, run it, and
:see what it says--if it says your drive is dead then RMA it, otherwise try
:to figure out if anything else is wrong, like a flaky power supply, before
:you assume that the drive is bad.
:
:If retrieving the data is an issue for you you need a better backup
:strategy.

I talked to two Seagate support guys this afternoon and they recommended
Seatools. I did run this a couple of days ago but interrupted the full
scan (over an hour). This time I run every test including the full test.
No errors were found.

I have no indication of other problems with the system, but maybe there
is something.

My backup strategy is pretty good and in fact, I think I lost very
little - just one HDTV show I recorded over a year ago and never
watched. Big deal. If it had been either of my other two HDDs, though, I
would have been well backed up, but I would certainly have lost some
information. If my boot drive, I would have had to install my 3
operating systems again. If my main data drive, I would have lost some
stuff, but 90+% of it is backed up on another HD.

If I'd lost more than one HD or all 3, I would have lost some data, but
most of the stuff that's really important to me would be backed up.

I'm formatting the drive as I type.