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My Seagate hard disk got bad sectors and wasn't usable any more. Seagate's SeaTools utility also indicates that. It was under warranty; so I returned that in Seagate SeaCare center and got a replacement drive within a few weeks. But even the replacement drive had the same problem of bad sectors and didn't even allow me to complete a Windows installation. So I visited the seagate service center one more time and got another replacement drive in a week's time. But to my surprise, that was faulty too and crashed during Windows installation. The SeaTools tests did confirm that both the replacement drives were indeed faulty.

Considering this I have following question for the community (and I hope I have chosen a right site out of stackexchange collection of sites):

  1. I have read that these replacement drives are not brand new but only refurbished ones. (People at seacare center don't seem to have technical knowledge about it!) I wanted to know if that is really the case? And how can two replacement drives fail in a row?

  2. More important question - do you think there might be anything wrong with my computer that's causing the disks to go bad so quickly? Whatever I know about computer hardware, this might not be the case. But I want to get opinions from experts out here before I decide to give up on my current disk and purchase a new one.

Mandar
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For your first question, yes, drives that you get back from such a "repair" both are not the exact drive you sent in, but also are not brand new. They are almost always "remanufactured" or "recertified". I once (years ago) called in on a drive I had just bought, and the vendor I purchased it from refused to do a replacement. So I called the manufacturer, and she urged me not to do a replacement through them, because it wouldn't be a new drive. She called my vendor and got them to do a replacement for me.

On your other question, could it be your computer? That's kind of what I was thinking... Have you tried these drives in another computer? Could it be that you have a cabling issue, a problem with that port on your controller/motherboard/backplane? Could it be that the drive isn't being cooled well enough (I've seen drives that were over their thermal limits report read/write issues).

I've never gotten a drive back from warranty repair that failed again right away. We mostly use Hitachi drives, but have done some RMAs on Seagates as well and not had any problems.

Sean Reifschneider
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