It's dead, Jim

[unixronin]

Further to the previously mentioned saga, by last night the restored whitestar was acting erratically again, and by this morning it's unbootable.  My initial suspicion was correct; the disk is definitely losing data.

So now I get to figure out if there's any way I can run Seagate's requested seatools on it (I'm guessing not, because I'm guessing the tool is Windows-only and requires MSIE), and get the drive RMA'd.

Comments

[merlinpendragon]

*plays taps*

Did it earn any medals for falling in the line of duty?

*joking*

Seatools

[ewen]

There is an "other OS" version of Seatools which IIRC is a bootable CD image and from memory I've successfully used it before. As you suspect there's also a Windows specific version which is presumably prettier, but the "other OS" version should be more than sufficient for RMAing. I've also been fairly successful in RMA'ing disks which are failing when the SMART data shows repeated errors (large number of checksum failures, relocated sectors, etc).

Ewen

Re: Seatools

[unixronin]

Yes, I found the bootable ISO and got a test code out of it. It confirms both that there are unrecoverable bad sectors on the media and that the disk is intermittently dropping off the bus.

[masgramondou.livejournal.com]

Buy a new drive from someone other than Seagate. Seagate's quality is currently crap

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

The Seagate was the least expensive 2.5" drive I could find at the time, or I wouldn't have bought it. Personally I've been fairly favorably impressed with Samsung drives for a while.

[lwj2.livejournal.com]

I had a 3.5 inch 3.2G Samsung -- years ago, mind you -- that was utter crap. I scrapped it and haven't purchased Samsung products since.

IIRC, it was about 60% of the price of an equivalent WD drive -- and worth every cent I paid for it.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

The Samsung SP1614C I put into vorlon in 2005 is still going strong. It's always been very fast and silent, and has really never given a problem aside from some mild stiction on cold starts in the depths of winter. Part of the difference, I think, is it was designed from the start to be an SATA drive, rather than as a PATA drive with a SATA interface bolted on to get it out of the warehouse.

[lwj2.livejournal.com]

This was an IDE drive, probably dating from about 1999 or so.

I replaced it with either a WD or Seagate.

Best drive I had was a 12.5G IBM drive -- built like a tank, ran forever until it got caught by a voltage spike. I was happy that the HD was the only casualty, at that it was a major pita.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Yup, I've bought a lot of IBM Ultrastars in my time...