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Old February 15th 06, 03:53 AM posted to comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage
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Default Seagate Barracuda 160 GB IDE becomes corrupted. RMA?

Dan_Musicant wrote
J. Clarke wrote
Dan_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.


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.


Then its unlikely to be the hard drive failing.
See what Everest says about the SMART data.
http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=4181

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


Something must have made it go unformatted.

Is it external or internal ?

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.


It should be all the data that you'll slash your
wrists if you lose, on CD or DVD at a minimum.

I'm formatting the drive as I type.