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Old February 15th 06, 08:54 PM posted to comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage
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Default Seagate Barracuda 160 GB IDE becomes corrupted. RMA?

On Wed, 15 Feb 2006 13:53:13 +1100, "Rod Speed"
wrote:

an_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 ?

Internal. Part number: ST3160023A-RK

I decided to go into Disk Management (win2000) and create logical
partitions, 2 of them, like before, formatting one to NTFS, the other to
FAT32 (so my Win98SE partition can see it). I formatted the NTFS and
then the FAT32, but when the FAT32 was finished formatting I got a
dialog saying "Volume size is too big" !! I tried it again, same thing.
I went into Windows Explorer and clicked the FAT32 volume and Windows
said it wasn't formatted and offered to format it. I said OK and after
it was done, a dialogue popped up saying "The disk in drive H cannot be
formatted."

I figure I can boot to a Win98SE floppy and try using fdisk to delete
all partition information and start from scratch but figure there's
something quite wrong with the drive and that I'm just wasting my time.
I figure I'll call Seagate and see what they say. I anticipate an RMA.
:
: 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 always have that stuff backed up, and generally at least to a
different PC (in case a PSU blows up everything in the box), and I also
have offsite backup on DVD, which I do occasionally.
:
: I'm formatting the drive as I type.
: