Can't figure out what happened to my HD

[flowerpower]

Hey All,

I need some help figuring this out, I just noticed that my second hard drive dissapeared from my computer so i decided to restart the pc hoping it would reappear, it did, however i still can't access it, when i try to open it i get the following message:

H:\ is not accessible. The file or directory is corrupted and unreadeable.

BIOS still sees it, when i restart the PC, it lists both of my hard drives and both optical drives, but i can't open it in Windows.

This was preceeded by somewhat strange behavior this morning, my PC would not boot into XP and would freeze after the Windows is loading message, i had to restart several times by pushing the restart button to log on. It was somewhat slow at first but after the next restart was back to normal, and then i noticed the missing second HD. I checked the event viewer and there were many error and warning messages. I'm completely at a loss here, i have a lot of data on that hard drive that i hadn't backed up for a couple of weeks, can someone tell me cwhats going on here?

 

[Tmagic650]

Simple... You have a failing hard drive. This bad drive might be loading the IDE channel causing boot problems. If you only loose 2 weeks of data, consider yourself lucky

 

[flowerpower]

wow, that sux, i only had it for 10 months, in fact the whole system is that old. could be a bad SATA cable or something?

 

[Tmagic650]

Of course you could check or replace a cable. Who manufactured the hard drive?

 

[flowerpower]

oh, its a Seagate 320GB SATA 7200.10. If it did in fact die, do you think its still under warranty?

 

[Tmagic650]

Yes the seagate 320GB is under a 5-year warranty. Just go to the Seagate website and start the RMA procedure... I had 2 of these replaced in the last 3 months. They were replaced with a 400GB SATA

 

[flowerpower]

wow, you lost 2 in 3 months, now thats some failure rate, may be we are getting our hard drives from the wrong company? lol

First i want to see if Seagate has any diagnostic tools like WD does and run them just to make sure its actually dead, may be try new cables, that sort of thing. Also, do you think if i RMA this drive i can get a bigger one, lets say 500GB and pay the difference between the cost of this one and that one?

 

[Tmagic650]

It seems like the Seagate/Maxtor 320GB drives are failing early, but with the excellent Seagate warranty, I have no place to complain. Yes to can get a larger drive for a little money. Seagates Seatools is what you want. You can get it from Seagates website