Problem with Hard Drive....Pls help!!

[Bonesdad]

My Maxtor30GB 7200 RPM drive is having problems. It's prolly biting the dust, but I thot I'd check with y'all to see if anyone has ideas. On boot the other day, it started clicking and wouldn't load Win98SE. After a reboot, it worked OK for a while then the system would lock up (not sure that was cuz of drive tho).

Today I booted from a floppy and reformatted the drive. Not one problem. I installed windows, then the VIA 4in1 drivers (v 4.38) that I downloaded from the IWILL website (It's an old KK266). All installs seemed to go without a hitch. After doing all the Windows updates and installing drivers, I was installing various utilities (Winzip, Acrobat etc). Upon reboot, the system again would not boot up. The drive light accesses continuously, but no boot. Sooo...I booted again from floppy. Funny thing is, I can look at C: with no problem this way. I even ran scandisk and got no errors. Right now I am reformatting drive and will try it again.

I installed a brand new IDE cable, unplugged my CD ROM & CDRW so that I wasnt overloading the PSU, but still have the problems.

Do you think the drive is toast? It's less than 2 years old, but I suppose it could be bad. Fortunately, I got everything backed up.

 

[PYROTAK]

sounds like its dead.

continuous clicking is always a bad sign.

 

[Lord Evermore]

Run Maxtor's PowerMax diagnostics and see if it comes up with anything. It probably won't, though. It sounds like it may be having problems primarily on bootup, when it has to use the most power to spin up and is just warming up.

Certainly can't hurt to RMA it, it should still be in warranty.

 

[Bonesdad]

I'd like to RMA the sucker...but will they accept if the drive still works (even tho intermittently)? I am just about done loading it again...so far, so good. The only change I made from the last time is that I did not load the VIA 4in1 drivers. Letting MS do the drivers. I wonder...

 

[howdyduty]

Dreaded Click of Death. If they give you RMA, they are mostly accepting it as an exchange. Tell them what you stated here except leave out that it works sometimes. You can bet they get those types of requests often. Get the RMA while you can. Good Luck.

 

[novice]

Run Maxtor's utility on the drive. If it gives you an error code, then the RMA is a slam dunk, as long as it is within the warranty period (which was probably 3 years on a 30 gig drive.) I had to RMA a Maxtor 30 gig drive, and had no problem getting the replacement drive, which was a 40 gig D740X! I was very happy with it.

 

[Bonesdad]

I've had 2 seagates, 2 maxtors and 1 WD. Both Maxtor's crapped out on me. If it wasn't free, I wouldnt take it. I'm going back to seagate...or WD.