Help! I'm about to commit murder!

M

Merlin

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...on my external HDD!

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What I had...

Seagate 500 Gb HDD in a Vantec NexStar 3 case, connected to a desktop running XP Pro.

What I have now...

NEW Seagate 500 Gb HDD in a Vantex NextStar 3 case, connected to ANOTHER (identical) desktop, running Win 2k Pro.

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My external drive usually sits at work, connected via USB to my desktop. Short of a couple of other files, it normally just spins mp3s for me, so it's not exactly working hard.

It's usually disconnected (properly), and then unplugged, every night when I leave the office.

Last week I started getting all sorts of problems with my external drive.

It would freeze my PC if I tried accessing it with Explorer, etc.

I kept getting 'inpage' errors, etc.

I ran a LOT of tests on it...ScanDisk, Seagate's own diagnostics tools (all of the basic ones) from their website, and on or two utilities from the techies here.

I didn't find anything, but suspected the drive was utterly trashed.

Eventually it didn't even register a drive character.

The initial indication that the drive had a fault was that some of my tracks started skipping in WinAmp - none of my tracks have skips. I know that for a fact.

At around the same time my PC had started acting funny. It runs constantly, but I needed to reboot it and when I did, it did not get past the POST. We tried utilities from Hiren's Boot CD to no avail.

The desktop was replaced with an identical one. New drive, format, new OS (now W2K instead of XP). I ran a ScanDisk and format on the old HDD and got no issues, so I don't know what the problem is/was.

Back to my external drive...

I had the supplier swap it out two days ago, with an identical drive.

Their software picked up what it suspected was bad sectors.

Guess what? I've had a couple of skips on my tracks this morning...

I'm still seriously ticked that I lost about 400 Gb worth of data. So please, if you have some advice for me, share it...

The desktop runs on a UPS (immune to spikes, but my external drive does not).

We've had no spikes though, and no-one else here has had any issues, with any of their hardware.

New drives, new computer, new software...

The music currently on my drive is many months old, and has not been modified, so the chance of it being a virus are nil.

I've run this setup since July, when I got my external drive, and I've used it like that nearly every day with no issues.

Any ideas?
 
maybe the music just didn't buffer. play it again and see if it skips on the same places.

Did you copy it from your broken hdd?

You might also not have usb2 drivers installed by default because you are using win2000? don't know if the speed decrease would cause mp3's to skip though
 
I also heard there were a lot of bad Seagate 500Gb drives kickin' about.
 
Hi guys,

It's the same symptom as last week...songs randomly skipping sections.

The PC is more than adequate for what I'm using it for, and I'm even trying different applications.

For example, last week was XP Pro with IE, Outlook, Winamp 2.xx, etc.

This week it's W2K Pro with Mozilla, Outlook/Thunderbird, Winamp 2.xx, etc.

The music was copied from my Home PC, so no, not a broken HDD, and not at all involved in last week's antics.

To be honest, I'm not sure whether my work PCs are USB 1.1 or 2.0 - but I've never had an issue like this with USB 1.1.

The PC is fully updated, btw.

Any more info on that, kayvee?

Thanks, N.
 
There was a thread here somewhere about the 500gig seagates that wasn't working so lekker. Soz, don't have more info for you, but I do remember a fellow forumite had bought 4x500gig seagates and return 3 of them...

Not good news I suppose. :)
 
I took my external drive again, and it's the '11' revision, which Google finds plenty of trouble about. :(

Until this one absolutely fails (I'm certain of it, based on the earlier skips), do I have any leeway with the supplier to demand another drive, or an alternate drive?

Thanks, N.
 
seagate 500gb suffers from the same caching issues that affects media playback (music, movies) as the 1.5tb seagate drives

there's lots of complaints about it on the seagate forums
 
But doesn't the 1.5TB drive have a firmware update?

Mikroz, take your drive and copy everything to another drive, if possible. Wrap the drive in a few sock and through it around on a cement platform. Make sure it doesn't get scratched. Test again to see if it now truly fscked and take it back so they can replace it. :D
 
*lol* @ Sharkbait.

So there's not much I can do about the media playback? What a F/u. Nice of them to tell me that...it's pretty much the main reason I have my drive. :(

...but last week's drive still failed totally, and it started with these same symptoms.

N.
 
Mikroz said:
Any more info on that, kayvee?

Thanks, N.
Click to expand...

None that has already been mentioned in the above posts that beat me to it. Generally that there was an abnormally high failure rate the 500Gb models. I am sure it's been addressed by the manufacturer in current production. Chances are good that your replacement unit came from the same batch as your other failure, if that was the problem in the first case.

The supplier should be happy to of supplying you an alternative model/manufacturer, as these drives are returned/credited to him anyway.
 
It's direct from Rectron, and we buy a fair amount from them, so hopefully we can sort something out later this week. :)

Thanks for everyone's advice.

N.
 
SharkBait said:
And people wonder why I choose Western Digital drives over Seagate. :D
Click to expand...

As if Western Digital has never had a bad batch. This is very bad from Seagate, and the way they're handling it isn't helping either. Though having worked handling returns, Seagate by far has the fewest returns despite having the longest warrantee period which speaks volumes in itself. Even so I would stay away from their 500GB drives permanently, by the time this problem is over larger drives should be cheaper and 500GB won't seem as big anymore.
 
Were you playing any Kurt Darren? That tends to destroy HD's pretty quickly.
 
SharkBait said:
There was a thread here somewhere about the 500gig seagates that wasn't working so lekker. Soz, don't have more info for you, but I do remember a fellow forumite had bought 4x500gig seagates and return 3 of them...

Not good news I suppose. :)
Click to expand...

Yip, i returned 5 of the 4x 500gb Seagate Hdd's :(:(
 
I ran a thorough ScanDisk on both partitions last night, and as with the first drive, it picked up nothing odd.

...but I've gotten some more skips today.

This HDD is going back, no matter what. Hopefully they side with me and the deal goes smoothly. :(
 
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