SATA or HDD problem?

[Dominion]

Hi - this is my new build

Antec P180
ABit A8N Ultra
AMD 3200 Venice
XFX 7800GT
Crucial Ballistix 3200 (2x512)
Enermax Liberty 500w
80gb Maxtor 10 SATA 8gb cache

Been working alright for last few months apart from these random freeze ups (no BSOD, just screen freeze). All you would hear was the HDD clicking away. All i could do was press reset then power off to clear the problem. The power off button was also frozen during error. I thought i had a RAM or Mobo problem.

Yesterday i turned on PC, it froze during boot (at the point where it selects a boot device) it was asking for a system disk and the HDD was going nuts with clicking noise it makes. Now i think the HDD is broken.

The clicking was quite loud during certain operations even if it did not freeze - i read that maxtors could be noisy. Was this however a symptom that is was going to die?

I have put in my old IDE drive which is working so far. I'm planning to reconnect the SATA drive and see if i can read of it after booting from IDE drive.

Any thoughts? What i really need is another SATA drive to test with just to make sure it is the drive and not mobo.

[EzyStvy]

Loud clicking noise is a sign the drive is dieing.

[Dominion]

Yeah thought so

My old IDE drive was starting to make alot of noise - one of the reasons for the new build

This was my first Maxtor/SATA drive and i just thought the clicking was normal. It did it from the start and was not that noisy or frequent. Completely different sound from my dieing IDE drive. Its has much more chunky grating noise.

The maxtor was like a loud clock at times.

[Dominion]

Oh well i tried booting with both drives (double checked the BIOS to make it booted from the IDE drive first) no success. Computer would not boot at all.

I bought it from overclockers.co.uk as an OEM. I will call them tonight or tomorrow but i think they will just pass it over to maxtor direct RMA service.

Any advice? Maxtor says you need to pack the drive in a static bag in a box with hard polyestor surround. Or you void the warranty.

The drive was delivered to me wrapped in bubble wrap.

wonder if it will be worth buying a external USB2 enclosure and trying one last test

[kilgoretrout]

I think it would be worth your while to download maxtor's hard drive diagnostic utilities and thoroughly test the drive. They usually want you do do that before they let you rma it anyway.

[Dominion]

Originally Posted by kilgoretrout I think it would be worth your while to download maxtor's hard drive diagnostic utilities and thoroughly test the drive. They usually want you do do that before they let you rma it anyway.

Unfortunately thats not possible as my computer will freeze on boot with this harddrive attached. It won't even boot from the Windows XP disc.

[glc]

Contact Maxtor.

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[Dominion]

Cheers

I just contacted overclockers.co.uk, i thought they would just tell me to RMA to maxtor but they offered a full refund (even though it was 2 months old) and i bought a seagate instead.

I lost some data but at least my new build is 100%
Feel abit silly not realising that clicking meant the HDD was going to drive
but i had used the maxtor diagnostic tools and got a clean bill of health.

And i got a nice pair of Medusa 5.1 headphones with microphone. Just need to pick up a copy of BF2.