hi all
i currently have a seagate 40gb Hdd here that I think may be dead. One of my friends pc kept getting a bsod on boot so i had a look and it said that something recently installed could be causing the problem but thats not the case he said as he hasn't installed anything in a long time. I took the hdd out of his pc and put it in mine when i ran partition magic to have a look at it, it said that the drive was formatted in FAT but it should be ntfs so i tried to change it to ntfs but no luck it couldnt delete the FAT partition so i booted up with a win 98se boot disc and ran fdisc (that f#$ked it) then rebooted and ran PM again only now it says that it formatted the drive in ntfs but when i run it in fdisc again to check it, it said it was still FAT even though windows too recognises the drive as ntfs. So i tried using windows format, the problem here is i can do a quick format but not a full format. I tried copying data to the Hdd that worked and delete worked, But I think Bill's creation is only playing with me as the drive is STILL in FAT format. I think that windows is "pretending" or "thinking" that it's doing what I ask it too when i copy data to the drive but really it's using windows memory to complete my commands. The reason i came to this conclusion is that when i copy data to the drive there is not a sound I really think the spindle has locked and it thinks it has done what i ask of it but the spindle isn't moving.
Do you think as I do that the drive is fubar or would there be a way to unlock the spindle?

cheers

i really doubt windows would just "pretend" to write and delete the data, but u might want to use SeaTools Desktop to check out what kind of condition the drive is in.

i really doubt it too so please explain to me why windows finds the disc as NTFS but DOS finds it as FAT (not fat 32) cant format it as it goes all the way through then says cant format. Format it in partition magic it says it formatted it but it hasnt as it is still FAT. Partition magic also comes up occassionaly with it cant change the disc. also it sometimes comes up as EXT FAT(extended fat)

thanks for the tool link ill try it out but the online one said theres nothing wrong hmmm

i don't have any explanations for what's going on, but for an OS to only pretend to perform such operations would be totally irresponsible (and there would be no incentive for microsoft to implement such a thing). if this sort of thing happened, then critical information could/would be lost and the user would have no idea anything's wrong, which would not only screw the user, but there'd be no benefit to microsoft, who would only stand to lose credibility in such a scenario. i hope the tools can fix ur problem.

Ok i ran the complete test and I was right it's as dead as a door nail.
"this drive has severe physical defects, severe enough to warrant a replacement drive"

i could copy files to and from it but after a restart they were gone so it was lying in saying that it had copied the files to the disc. they must have been getting copied to memory or something instead of the disc (thats what i meant by pretending).

thanks for your input

heres the log it doesnt say much just that it failed

-----------------------------------------------------------------

DIAGATA.EXE Version 3.06.21230ML
Copyright (c) 2002 by Seagate Technology LLC. All rights reserved.

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Timer Resolution: 0.000122
Long Test Begin: 17-Jul-2003 19:46:27
Cable Test - 0 Errors
Buffer Test - 0 Errors
Identify Data
Model Number: ST340823A
Serial Number: 7EF0PRJ6
Firmware Revision: 3.54
Default CHS: 16383-16-63
Current CHS: 16383-16-63
Current Capacity: 16514064 Sectors
Total Capacity: 78165360 Sectors
80 Conductor Cable Reported
ID Method: Unknown
SMART Enabled
SMART Check: Passed
DST - Errors - Status: 07
Long Test Failed: 17-Jul-2003 19:55:13
SMART Disabled

============================================

DST - Errors means Directory structure Test Failed.

yup your correct that drive has gone poopoo get its RMA`ed ASAP unless its out of warantee you can get tools that will format it and wipe it with 0`s so no data ever can be recoverable.

though that may not work if the drive is so dead you cant do it hehe.

good luck.

me im waiting on my Western Digital 80 gig 8meg catche Special edition coming back from RMA it would be here today with amtrax


anyway to cut a long story short i only had the drive 2 hours and i got a SMART FALURE ERROR on boot up. it was due to a hardlock on defrag in windows had to hard shutdown
on reboot i got that error and it said i have to back up the data and replace the hdd faliure may be imminent LOL

well anyway getting the new rma today i just hope it will not do the same after 2 hours of use. :P

just do a low end format thats suposed to make youre drive work again !!!

when seagate's own diagnostic software is telling him there are severe physical defects and to replace the drive, i don't think a simple format will solve the problem.

Actually, in most cases a low level will re-allocate bad sectors enough that the drive will become usable again and may even last you years. I have done it on several drives, including one that had physical defects on 30% of the disk. I lost quite a bit of space after the format but the drive stayed alive for another 5 months before the bad sectors started to spread too much. Granted, most of my experience has been with SCSI, and being that his drive is IDE it may just be easier to get the RMA since IDE isn't as good at error correction/prevention as SCSI is. Oh, and drives don't "pretend" to read/write data. If it says the data was written to the drive, it is there. It wasn't just written to memory. Even with severe physical errors on the disk, data can still be written to it... just not very stablily.

No its gone to HDD heaven. I asked them what happened to the drive in the last few days they said nothing but they said they thought the floppy drive was stuffed because they heard a "BANG" so I hooked up their floppy and there was nothing wrong with it, So I'd say it was the HDD that went BANG and going by the way that pc is used there is no wonder it did. eg. It gets used to play games write cd's and surf the net at the SAME TIME and when it crashes because of this it gets violently punched then the reset button gets pressed. Never gets defragged or anything else, It was not a well looked after peice of equipment.

spinrite 5,find it dl it,test your drive,and after that as only and last solution consider low level format.

Do a low end format and it will work after
i use maxtor tools since they work on others hdd from other companies!!
low end format takes a while abut after it should work with no problems at all !!!

How can a low level format or HDD Regenerator fix a physically damaged part of the hard drive. All this software really does is it claims to fix it by marking the bad sectors so that O/S won't access them to write to them or install on them.

That's like running a software to fix part of a car engine that broke one of its cylinders. It's realistically not possible.

HDD damage can result from many reasons; enough accumulation of tiny dust particles which later form a static charge; being overworked; overheating; electromagnetic fileds nearby (pc speaker, another hdd on top; big fan too close..etc..) and of course with time sometimes or just poor production from assembly line. Who cares why....

You can't fix hardware with software.

@slayerking
Good choice, I too would RMA the sucker.