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Spawn-Inc
12-20-2007, 11:34 PM
well my Seagate Barracuda ST3250620AS is starting to fail :(:(:(:(:(

the other day i turned on my pc only to find a bunch of programs that popped up saying cannot find/run etc. my g15 programs wouldn't work, steam wasn't running either. i logged off and logged on and same thing. so i opened windows explorer and didn't see my hard drive WTF?!?!?

i rebooted and it worked this time, whew! well it was short lived as i booted up again today and the same thing. i loaded up UBCD4W and tried to checkdisk and fix any errors and it froze midway so i took the hard drive out and put it in my external enclosure. i flipped the switch and nothing... great a dead hard drive with a bunch of stuff on it!

i did how ever transfer a bunch of stuff as soon as i got the new hard drive so its not a total loss but i do have to reinstall all my games and etc. i run my os on my new harddrive and games/programs on the old one.

i went to seagate to check my warranty and i have until 2011 to exchange it only but that's all i would want any how. while looking around they have a program called SeaTools that says it can potentially fix a hard drive that appears to be dead. i reinstalled my harddrive to run this program and whadda ya know it works again. so i'm thinking its a on off thing so i will be buying a new harddrive to copy the drive over and then i will erase all the data on the broken one and send it in.

so my questions are
1. has anyone tried seatools? does it work?
2. if i boot up can i use it when the harddrive is working?
3. how well does ghosting a drive work and is it faster than just coping everything?

SgtM
12-21-2007, 12:48 AM
1. has anyone tried seatools? does it work?
2. if i boot up can i use it when the harddrive is working?
3. how well does ghosting a drive work and is it faster than just coping everything?

1. Haven't used it.
2. You could use it, but I would be very skeptical while doing so. Make sure you have a good backup
3. Ghosting a drive works very well. In fact, it will save you from having to reinstall the OS, programs, any regedits, E-mail, favorites. The whole works.

If you do end up sending that drive back to seagate, I would recommend wiping it completely with a 3rd party app like dban (http://dban.sourceforge.net).

Spawn-Inc
12-21-2007, 12:54 AM
i just installed it and its running right now and so far its working good, it passed 2 short tests and i am starting to run the longer ones, i kinda hope it comes up with something so i can have a valid reason to exchange the hard drive.

good to hear ghosting works properly :) i will use the UBCD and completely wipe/format the drive 2 or more times just to be sure. thx for the quick response +rep.

EDIT:
oh another thing i meant to ask was has anyone dealt with seagate and how/what you have to do when you want to exchange/rma a hard drive?
do they test it out first, what if it boots up everytime on there system?

Cannibal23
12-21-2007, 01:11 PM
have not used seatools. but here is some tips for failing hard drives from my own experiance.

if you know its flakey dont keep turning it on and off to see if you can get it working untill you have a plan. the more times you power it up the more likely that it wont work the next time. if you get the drive working and your going to ghost a copy of it. dont expect the copy to be bootable at all. it might be but if your already having read issues on the old drive there is a good probability that even if the new one boots some files will be corrupt or missing and will cause you alot of stress later. if your using norton ghost to make your copy, make sure you go into the options and set them to be as forgiving as posable (ignore crc and bad blocks and enable forced copying). at some point i will have to make a procedure on working with failing hard drives. this topic keeps comming up