Thanks. Now I don't know what to think about my new Seagate 300GB hard
disk. It started squeaking/beeping, became very slow and Windows
reported being unable to read from the boot sector. Putting it in the
freezer cured the problems, after a reformat there are only file
structure errors (with the Seatool iso, not the online scan).
Should I RMA the drive anyway? If I do, and the freezing "fixed" the
drive, they will find no errors, post it back to me and waste my effort.
If a HD squealed and beeped and I had to put it in the freezer, I
definitely would have sent it back.
The only thing that would prevent from doing it is if I suspected
something else caused it.
One thing --- Seagates have a 5 year warranty so you can send it back
anytime of you want to risk keeping it and have no cirtical data on it
..
Seagates have had boosters saying they were the best HDs but there
were strings of devastating reviews at Amazon talking about how their
400-500 and I think some 300 gig external HDs all crashed and burned
catastrophically after using them a short while. There seemed to be
some problem with the external cases or drives. This touched off some
rumors that the new series werent as good. They were mostly large
drives though 400-500 i think the sizes were. Not as many 300s I
think. Theyve probably fixed it by now or you would see universal
bashing of seagates by now.
Another thing --- I had a WD brand new 200 gig that started clicking
and freezing and crashing and wouldnt boot up. I had to try 3-4 times
to boot up. Those are classic signs of HD failure. I was ready to pack
it up but later had even more problems and traced it back to a bad
stick of memory that was corrupting WIN etc After I swapped that stick
out for a new one Kingston sent me and I low level formatted the WD
havent had any problems since then which was about 6-7 months ago.
After that unfortunately Ive had other problems which I blamed on a
Seagate etc but it tuned out to be my motherboard which is why I RMAd
it and had all kinds of weird problems . That was the reason I used
seagate tools. My nforce4 chip I think was overheating I think and
corrupting data etc .
Im using my nforce3 system now and have no problems until I get my
RMAd board back hopefully any day now.
You arent using a nforce4 board are you?