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Hard Drive Already Failing (Ghost in the Machine)?

At around 5:00 PM this evening, my new rig randomly rebooted and I got the dreaded “disk error: press any key to restart” error.  Of course I went through this a dozen times just to make sure I wasn’t seeing things.  Mind you this drive is less than 2 weeks old with a brand new install of WinXP.  I booted into the recovery console and ran chkdsk /R; spun for a good 30 minutes and then it booted fine, though it didn’t mention any corruption issues.  Scanning through the Event Log, I have a good 20 or so “The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk1\D” errors, clicking the support link actually took me somewhere with info (first time ever) which stated the following:

Explanation

This problem is typically caused by a failing cable that connects the drive to the computer.

User Action

Replace the cable.

 

So it looks like my drive shipped with a faulty SATA cable.  Seagate will be getting a piece of my mind very shortly via email.  Whatever.


Posted May 29 2005, 06:28 PM by Jayson Knight

2 Comments

Mat Hall wrote re: Hard Drive Already Failing (Ghost in the Machine)?
on 05-30-2005 4:36 AM
Although you may have checked this already, before you go blaming Seagate open the case up, unplug the SATA cable, and plug it back in to a different socket -- the problem may also be caused by a faulty SATA header on the motherboard or not seating the cables properly.

Not that I'm casting aspersions on your machine-assembling skills, of course... I once had a "faulty graphics card" that in the end turned out to be caused by me not quite seating the auxilliary molex connector properly -- the crashes kept trying to blame themselves on faulty drivers, etc., but were really caused by not the card not getting enough power due to the less than optimal contact between plug and socket. I've also had what seemed like a flaky CD drive which turned out to be a dry solder joint on the IDE header...

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