How often do you get a lemon hard drive? I think I did! Please Help!!!!!

[BPiersol]

My dads computer had a power surge that fried a chip on his old HDD. It was a Quantum Fireball 6.4 gb. I found and purchased him another one (same kind and size, brand new). I ran Fdisk, partitioned it, and installed Windows 98. I then installed his video, modem and sound drivers. Everything was great for about 30 minutes, when I got a big blue screen that saidDisk Write Error- Unable to write to disk in drive C: Data or files might be lost. Press any key to continue. Then the HDD made some noises (like clicking or popping) and my computer pretty much froze. Well, I rebooted but it gave me an error message saying that drive C wasn't partitioned. I rebooted again, and got into windows for about 3 minutes and got the blue screen again. After this happened, I pulled the pc apart and took the HDD out. Now it sounds like a ball bearing is loose inside of it.
I contacted Maxtor's warranty service and they're shipping out a replacement. My question to all of you is this- Do you think I just got a bad HDD, or do you think I have some other problem? The pc is a Compaq 5440 AMD K-6 2 450 mhz. The bios has been re-flashed with a newer version from the motherboard manufacturers website (so I guess it's not a Compaq pc anymore!). The mobo is a Gigabyte GA-5SMM.

 

[bozo1]

Definitely a bad drive if you hear something rattling around in it.

 

[BPiersol]

Thats what I was thinking, too. But I kind of wondered why it did that after about a half an hour of actually using it. The hard drive worked for about 1 1/2 hours before it died. It took about an hour to partition and install windows. I then used the pc for about 30 minutes. Doesn't that seem strange? Or is there some sort of burn in period that it didn't make?

 

[compudog]

I've gotten two bad (consecutive) hard drives from Western Dig. The first worked for about a week. I RMA'd and got a second rpelacement drive and that didn't even get through the OS install phase. The third drive was the winner and is still running fine.