Barracuda XT, Barracuda, Barracuda Green, DiamondMax and other desktop SATA and IDE drives

[raysta]

Hi, I've read about the firmware issue regarding this drive, and have flashed the drive 3 times. But today I spoke to the place where I bought the drive, and they say my symptoms are not related.

So I thought I would ask here.

Power on - drive is detected

Boot up, drive will be lost, sometimes at loading hal.sys sometimes with a BSOD, sometimes during XP.

CTRL-ALT-DEL and drive is NOT in bios.

Power off/on and drive is back (until it is lost as per above).

I flashed to 1A but it also decided at that point to give me SMART bad (after it was good pre-flash).

So is this just a bad drive?

Thanks

[phorn]

Did any of these issues ever happen before upgrading the firmware?

Of course it would be nice if they said what exactly the new firmware changed, but I've heard some posts say that the new firmware ups the power usage of your drive. And the symptoms you have sound like your drive is shutting down while your computer is running (which will happen if your PSU is underpowered. One sign of this is if you hear a click and your drive starts to spin down-- you can open up the side of your computer case to hear if this is happening.

I would suggest maybe trying to unplug some other parts of your system (like a CD drive) and see if that keeps your machine running a little longer. Also I don't know if this makes any difference, but I like to split up the power cables so that each device comes off a different connector from the PSU.

If it's not a power problem I have no idea but you can try going to SeaTools DOS and see if you are able to run a short test before your drive shuts down.

[raysta]

I tried it another system, which was very lightly loaded. It failed there too. Took it back to the shop who swapped it over because the SMART was bad ..... well the firmware had some positive effect !!