Hard drive failure?

[Killerkebab]

Background info:
- Abit AB9 motherboard
- 2x WD Raptor 150GB in RAID0
- 1x Seagate 500GB

Windows is installed on a RAID array consisting of two 150GB WD Raptors plugged into SATA8/9 (Jmicron RAID controller)

The hard drive in question in the picture is a 500GB Seagate plugged into SATA1, which I think is an Intel controller (ICH8?). Plugging it into SATA2 didn't change anything though.

The Jmicron controller has up to date drivers (I had to use them in Windows setup so it could even see the RAID array). The other controller doesn't, as far as I know. I went to the Intel site to get updated drivers and the program I downloaded informed me that my hardware isn't catered for, apparently

The Seagate drive is more or less brand new and up until yesterday was the drive Windows was installed on (I got my raptors back and decided to format everything and use the raptors as system drives) with absolutely no problems.

Questions:
- What hard drive errors would cause windows to appear with such a message?
- Any fixes?

 

[thingemajib]

which family is the seagate from? i have the 500gb 7200.12 (7200.11 and i think 7200.10 also do 500gb), and i had a few issues with formatting it initially. it just didnt seem to like having multiple partitions with different formats (worked fine setting up 7 alongside xp, but then started playing up trying to shoehorn ubuntu on as well). basically, it would either bsod upon windows startup, or just freeze on POST.

Booted up off a different drive (through disabling some sata features in the bios,i was able to still acess the files on the drive) and got a few diagnostic tools that didnt detect anything wrong with it. i eventually gave in and did a surface reinitialisation/hard wipe (its on "hard disk sentinel" i think...), and the problems mysteriously went away.

only downside is that wipe took about 2 days to complete...

 

[rpstewart]

It may be as simple as a badly seated connection - you may have knocked something putting the Raptors back in although the fact that moving the Seagate to a different port doesn't help kind of rules it out. I would check the drive end of the cable though just in case.

Next step is going to be getting a copy of Seagate's data lifeguard program from their website and running that to see what it says.

 

[Killerkebab]

Could the problem be drivers? I dual boot XP/Win7 (from the raptors) and when I'm in XP the hard drive doesn't produce any popups (or at least hasn't yet)

 

[mymorph]

i had this come up a few times when overclocking my system, did a few disk checks and nothing found. hasnt appeared for a long time now

 

[Justintime]

Is this not when the Disk throws up a SMART error? Vista did something similar in one of my rigs with a 750Gb Seagate drive and voila, within two days she was stone cold dead, lucky i saw the error and backed it up, losing like 3 unimportant files as they could not be read.

 

[snaggster]

I would trust the message and backup buddy... I take it volume "e" is your 500gb seagate.. At least you wont be losing your raid.

 

[Killerkebab]

I've already backed up - the drive was empty anyway. As I said, I've just installed windows XP/7 on the RAID array and had that 500GB seagate as a sort of storage area. Since that thing started popping up a mere 15 mins into my Win7 use (but as of yet, has NOT appeared in XP) I haven't copied anything to it yet.

 

[PhillyDee]

Do the lifeguard tests then and see what it says. Try to find the SMART error too. It could be nothing, it could be something!

 

[Killerkebab]

I have news!

I went to Seagate's website and downloaded SeaTools DOS, their diagnostic and repair tool. SeaTools offers various different kinds of tests if you boot to it on startup. This is how the drive did:

SMART test: FAIL
Short Drive-Self-Test: FAIL
Long test: PASSED

WTF?
The program says the reason for failure is "unknown" but the program kindly generated an error code for me: A3A8D162

What I can't figure out is why the short diagnostic failed, but the long test which looks at every sector (and which took hours) passed without a hitch
Whilst I was at it, I also got SeaTools to rewrite every sector as zeros in case a bad format that was the problem. I'm back at square one, I guess. Other than that stupid popup, the drive appears to work perfectly well

 

[Wizzkidy]

If its failing with seagates own tools I would say the drive is gone mate and you need to RMA. Windows 7 is normally pretty good when it comes to HDD fails. it seems once again it was right as seagates own tools it is also failing.

 

[Justintime]

RMA it, SMART fail on anything is bad, drive could go on for 5yrs or die tomorrow.