Arfa Daily wrote:
> Here's one I've never had before. Earlier this week, my wife informed
> me that a business-related CD ROM that she uses regularly on my
> machine, was failing to read. She was right. Further investigation
> revealed that the machine, a Dell, could no longer see my 250GB data
> drive either. This drive is a Seagate, and was replaced probably a
> little over a year ago, because its predecessor, which had been in
> there a long time, had begun dying with nasty noises and erratic
> reads. Both the CD ROM drive and the Seagate, are on IDE channel 1, in
> cable select format.
>
> My first suspicion was that something had happened to the mother
> board's IDE driver IC, but the Windoze diagnostic said that it was ok.
> Further checks disconnecting stuff, showed the problem to be the
> Seagate drive that was hanging up the channel 1 IDE bus. As soon as it
> was disconnected, the CD ROM drive came back on line.
>
> I got a new 320GB drive from Maplin's for 49 quid (how good a deal is
> that ?) and was able to restore its contents from the external backup
> drive that I have, and which does a backup automatically every night.
>
> I've never had a drive fail in this way before, problems usually being
> motor or bearing related. Anyone else had it ?
>
> Arfa
Very common ! If its still under warranty return it to Seagate. Since
the lead free thing I've seem a number of problems like this. A common
one is the the solder joints behind the connector seem to fail. I just
go over the bad ones with a soldering iron and fresh solder. You can
actually see the cracks with a 20X loupe.
--
Best Regards:
Baron.
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