Bad hdd? Corrupt OS?

[jfenwick]

Lol, i've learnt the hard way to backup and then play around when trouble shooting HDs. As for connections and stuff, yeah, checked that as one of the first things and then after that have swapped it in and out a number of times now to an external drive.

Its a seagate barricude 500GB SATA and the motherboard is a gigabyte EP43

Newegg.com - Open Box: GIGABYTE GA-EP43-DS3L LGA 775 Intel P43 ATX Intel Motherboard

At this point I can't get my system to identify the drive anymore. After that failed re-format it no longer detects it or the other partition. I'm going to swap it back to her system for a final check to see if it's detected there, if not then no doubt she's bricked.

My next plan was to run seatools as i imagine seagate will ask her to run it when/if she RMAs it but as I can't ID the drive right now even that is out.

Edit:

I dunno guys, he was able to back up the files when he transplanted the hard drive. That tells me that the HD is good.

That was my initial thought as well but all these other problems followed....still confuses me but no way to double check anymore as the drive is a mess now

 

[zmatt]

So you cant see the drive on your machine? Are you looking at it in BIOS? It wont show up under my computer, but it will under disk management. If the disk is totally invisible then it is the issue, if not then I think that the mobo may still be the culprit. As for reformatting there are some utilities like kill disk and boot nuke that can force format drives. You may want to try them, the windows formating program may not be robust enough.

 

[SparkMonkeyHellion]

And he ins't a n00b, I doubt he would make such a mistake.

True, but that loose wire thing I had was not very obvious, and it wasn't until my colleague accidentally pulled it all the way out did we figure it out!

But yeah, plugging it into a working mobo is the best way to test where the breakdown is.

 

[jfenwick]

So you cant see the drive on your machine? Are you looking at it in BIOS? It wont show up under my computer, but it will under disk management. If the disk is totally invisible then it is the issue, if not then I think that the mobo may still be the culprit. As for reformatting there are some utilities like kill disk and boot nuke that can force format drives. You may want to try them, the windows formating program may not be robust enough.

No, that's what I mean, it showed up before in disk management which is where i initiated the reformat before. However, after about 75% it booted me saying unable to format and since then I've been unable to detect it anywhere. This is on my working system, hers is obviously dead without the HDD.

I'll give one of those programs a try before I have her RMA it. Will post back here after I try it back on her system and try the kill disk or boot nuke.

Last resort is I just lend her one of my 500 barracudas, I have 4 of the same drives in my systems and one of them as an external. i'll just transfer my info over and give her mine while i keep playing with hers. I guess if i try that we'll get a reading on her mobo as well.

 

[jfenwick]

Just an update, I haven't tested the dead hdd but I did plug in my other 500 and it reformatted and installed XP pro without issue at all. Looks like it was the hdd. I'll test some more but right now the other options are quickly fading.

 

[Evolv]

Hm, I had a perfectly good Seagate 250Gb fail on me too. And it was only a couple months old, ran Seatools and it had some errors or bad sectors on it. I don't know, thats why I like to stick with Western Digital, so far no problems with them.

 

[jfenwick]

As for reformatting there are some utilities like kill disk and boot nuke that can force format drives. You may want to try them, the windows formatting program may not be robust enough.

Booya! Kill disk seems to have taken card of it, used the "kill disk" option and a few hours later it seems to read no problem...I haven't and won't be trying to install an OS on this as I already gave my aunt one of mine in exchange so she could get her system up and running but atleast I shouldn't have to do the RMA on it.

I'm not sure what I did to get the comp to recognize it again but after a number of disconnects/reconnects on the external and a number of shut downs on the comp it suddenly re-appeared as an un-formatted external drive. I immediately killed it with kill disk and now it seems to be operating normally again. I'll put it through the paces to make sure its not temporary but all is looking good for now.

BTW, mobo took the new hdd without issue, windows installed first try, drivers and everything took without issue. Seems to be running normally other than a sound issue i'm going to have to post in another thread if i don't figure it out.

Thanks!

 

[zmatt]

Your welcome, always glad to help.