I just bought that disk (seagate SATA 500G) half year ago and found it stop working randomly, resulting the whole system to be dead. BTW, I am using Win XP. I tried to use seatool, provied by seagate, to scan and repair the error, the program stop at the half of the process. I even can't format entirely, just do quick format. I don't know what I can do and have been pissed off for a few days.

hope some people have this kind of experience and give me any idea. I don't want to loss my 500G data storeage.

thanks in advance.

First, I didn't get your problem exactly, Is your drive working now or not ?


second, Did you try running a chkdsk before going in for the seatool ?

most of the time the problem is with the directory structure or some corrupt file and ppl start thinking that their hdds are busted


thirdly, when you run this CHKDSK, run it with both the option, I mean the 'automatically fix file system errors' and 'Scan and attempt to fix bad sectors'

thanks for the caring....
well, I would say the disk is working, but not stable. I don't know the reason.
I did run chkdsk, not one time, when I check both options, the process would stop unexpectedly. same problem happened when I use seatool to run test in pure dos mode...

perhaps, I had to change another disk for data safety.
anyway, thanks for help

I agree you should try chkdisk first and, as that failed, you can probably find some lower level tools, those that address the disk in binary mode... that way you can at least create a disk image for later retrieval if your hd condition worsens.. certainly it's a good idea you back up your data before doing anything else if you can do that in a simpler way (i.e. from windows)

Have ago at asking a friend to try it and also check the disk. You never know the results trying in a different computer can give.

No problems
I try to help ppl and some ppl think i am spamming

NEways.. I'll say since its a 500 GB it might take up time to analyze for bad sectors. Its a deep scan and does take a lot of time. I had an 80 GB and took around 5 hrs to analyse. it does not depend too much on the processor and other things. May be a SATA would take less time but still since its 500 GB I am assuming it would take like 4-5 hrs atleast for the surface scan.

I would suggest you get a backup and get the disk replaced.

By the way , assuming you have a partitioned drive this could be a problem with MBR. Could you try running a FIXMBR command using the recovery option on Windows boot disk. It might solve the problem. Give it a try before taking it for the replacement.

I say RMA the hard drive and get yourself a new one, sounds like it got damage in someway, most likely some bad sectors or something. However, the hard drive maybe corrupted and so you might have to reinstall the operating system as that could be the culprit in all of this.

Do all your tests halt at the same position on the disk? It could be that the disk is physically damaged, perhaps it's PCB is malfuncioning, preventing even seagate's tool to access the hard drive...

Also, if your hard drive is still under warranty, use it, and have the disk replaced... And of course, don't forget to get all the data you can from it...

Seagate 750GB hard drive corrupted
Help For My Seagate Sata Hard Drive!

I have a 750GB seagate hard drive which I use as an external hard drive through usb cord since I'm using a laptop. Already I used to have some problems with delayed writing failed problems and never really got to solve it. Again today it said this and the hard drive just stopped working. Usually I just needed to restart it, but today it wont work. It'll turn on and my laptop notifies me that I have plugged in a usb but when I try to open it it says " the file or directory is corrupted and unreadable" I have about 400gb of important stuff on it... Cant afford to lose it. Please help! thanks.