Harddrive click

Dolby

Dolby

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I bought a brand new, shiny Seagate external 1TB and lent it to a collegue at work 3 days after I got it.

She brought it back 3 weeks later - scratched and looking tatty! I grit my teeth and took it home - but was pretty peeved. I plugged it into a Vista PC and it recognised, but refused to format or scandisk (did nothing).

However the dreaded 'click, click, click' physical sound was there and I kew she's probably dropped it :/

I unplugged it and tried in my XP machine and it formatted ... I copied files onto it, played them, delted them and all seemed normal.

Is it at all possible that software (formatting) could 'repair' physical damage on a drive? Maybe reset something that was out of allignment?

I've learnt my lesson with lending things to people :/
 
6000th post! A format can fix physical damage (actually nothing can fix physical damage), by marking the damaged sectors as damaged, or bad. This prevents further writes to the damaged parts, thus your disk appears to be fixed. All disks have damaged/bad sectors, its quite normal.

In your case, it sounds as if the damaged part of the disk contained the MFT, NTFS equivalent of the FAT, which is why Windows did not recognize it. The format recreated this table on an undamaged portion of disk.

I would be wary of putting important stuff on the disk until you know it is 100% working. Also do some low level SMART tests etc. just to be sure.
 
I downloaded Seagate Seatools (or something) and attempted a SMART test ... it said test unavailable :/

I assumed SMART referred to internals?
 
Yeh - the sectors would be marked as bad - but what about the clicking? That would concern me - see if you can clean it up and get it swapped under guarantee.
 
You going to trust a drive that USED to click and might of been dropped?
 
Conradl said:
Does it still click? Perhaps a guarantee swap is best....
Click to expand...

Well they can see it's been abused and used for a month - they'd laugh at me.

xrapidx said:
You going to trust a drive that USED to click and might of been dropped?
Click to expand...

I won't KEEP anything on it - I'll use it to transfer not-so-crital data from one place to another
 
Dolby said:
I downloaded Seagate Seatools (or something) and attempted a SMART test ... it said test unavailable :/
Click to expand...

As far as I know SMART does not work across USB. I could never get my external WD to display SMART info.

When you boot your PC up it will tell you SMART is enabled for all the PATA/SATA drives but not the USB drive.

You could always remove the drive from it's housing and connect it via SATA to check SMART. While you are at it check the firmware and flash it.

Don't you just hate it when people treat your property like ****? I would not have bitten my lip you did however.
 
Is it a 7200.11 drive?

Are there dents?

Or are there only scratches?

If it's a 7200.11 drive, what firmware is it running?

If there are dents, then you're out of luck with RMA, but for just scratches, you might get away with it.

Here's an easy one: ask her if she dropped it :p
 
these seagate freeagent drives all click from the factory
 
I'd pull it from its case and run spinrite on it. The warranty is pretty much shot by now anyway from the sounds of it.
 
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