Barracuda issues

[flaminggerbil]

Having (even more) trouble with a 7200.11 Barracuda which has caused me strife in the past, it died on me once with the much loved firmware fault which they promptly fixed and I've since been using it as a backup drive, instead using a newer 7200.12 for the os.

So after leaving my computer alone for an hour I come back to find it on a screen I've got quite used to due to the previous problem telling me that there was no bootable drive installed, checking the bios the boot drive is displayed (although moved down to drive #3) and my older backup is no longer displayed.

After removing the backup it'll now boot up seemingly fine, the only error report of relevance just states that "The previous system shutdown at 19:26:08 on ‎15/‎12/‎2009 was unexpected.", if it is just a simple and premature drive failure I cant see why it would force it to shut down and not allow it to detect the other and only, bootable drive.

At somewhat of a loss now, really dont want to phone seagate again, most useless support ever. Anyone got an idea of what could cause this other then the drive just being dead?

 

[flaminggerbil]

Still refusing to boot with both drives attached, even though the boot drive is still shown in the bios, puzzled.

 

[flaminggerbil]

Really dont want to have to resort to phoning Seagates support, they're thoroughly useless.

 

[flaminggerbil]

Well have you run Sea Tools?

no bootable drive installed, checking the bios the boot drive is displayed (although moved down to drive #3) and my older backup is no longer displayed.

Strangely enough no, slightly impossible.

 

[flaminggerbil]

So you cant boot into windows?

I dont understand why your boot drive is listed as 3. It should be listed as 1. Cant you change it in the bios back to the primary drive?

I'd also run the seagate tools on your new drive.

Sorry probably didnt make that clear enough, it's listed as #2 on the boot order (below dvd drive), but on the general list of SATA devices when the dodgy drive is plugged in it magically switches about, even though it's previous position is shown as empty.

New one's not shown any dodgy behaviour, but I'll give it a go just in case.

 

[flaminggerbil]

Tests all passed fine on the newer drive.

 

[flaminggerbil]

O lawd, more failures.

After temporarily giving up on the other drive a new issue has emerged making the mobo seem a much more likely candidate.

Tried to boot up and was greeted with a disk read error, rebooted, disk read error, checked the bios, nothing changed, shut down for a minute before restarting and windows repair fires up.
Tried running checkdisk through command prompt and it fails giving me some generic error and a disk size of around 1gb, shut down again and tried switching the SATA port the drive's hooked up too.
It's now seemingly running again, it is possible that two drives die in a week (in slightly odd circumstances) but seems very unlikely.