SeaTools

[Goldpanners]

I have seatools v1.2.0.4 installed on my Toshiba Laptop with windows XP professional sp3, I have (4) Seagate 2tb external hard drives, model: ST320005EXA101-RK.

I use to have seatools v1.2.0.2 on my system and that worked good, but here is the trouble I am having:

On one of my hard drives I got skips or shall I say pauses as I watch videos, it just started doing it, I notice a clicking sound when it does it and the green blinking light will stop as the video freezes then it will start up again, sometimes it does this at random and sometimes it does it every 10 to 15 minutes, it varies.

So I hooked the external drive up to my laptop and ran seatools and it failed all the tests and gave me codes: 969FD5ED and 969FD5CD and the firmware on this one unit is CC94, now the tests failures got me worried but I wanted to test another hard drive that I just bought that skips and pauses once in awhile too, it is the same model, that did the same thing, it failed all tests, so to be on the safe side I tested another one of these same exact drives only this one works perfectly and it came up as failed too and I know that one is good so it has me wondering that maybe the seatools is faulty in my set up, it reads all the hard drives info, no problems recognizing them, I can read and access all the data on the hard drives.

So I read somewhere on here to download a different program and try that, it is called: HDD Scan for Windows v3.3 and I ran that and it all checks out good on all of them, now I know that is a limited program but it's good ratings has me wonder about seatools readings.

I don't want to be sending back hard drives if I'm getting false reading on failures when in fact there is none, I ran checkdisk in windows to repair and scan and repair the sectors, the very long process and then I ran seatools again and it still shows failures, I don't know what those codes mean and seagate has no reference on their site, they only show a few codes.

Anyhow is anyone having the troubles I'm having like this? I un-installed seatools and re-installed and no change, I wish I could go back to v1.2.0.2 because that worked great but then again the hard drive wasn't clicking and freezing but that still don't explain why the others are checking in as failed, my oldest drive is almost 1 year old and the others are only a few months old.

[Goldpanners · Accepted solution]

Adding a fix to my own post, I contacted Seagate support by e-mail and unlike what others say on this forum Seagate support does answer their e-mails and they do so very quickly.

The problem I listed above was helped and solved by a Seagate Technical person called: Travis, he worked with me through the e-mail and I explained everything to him that was going on with my set-up and he had me run some tests, do some checks, etc. etc.

Then after all that he told me he would do more research on this issue and get back with me, well as promised he did, the same day and said he had a level 3 Tech run the same tests as I did with the v1.2.0.5 Seagate tools and he also was getting failures on the tests on known good hard drives, so he told me that he was going to bring this up to the software and technical engineers to see what is up with the software, he would keep me informed.

Well less then 24 hours later he e-mailed me and told me to uninstall the old version of Seatools and install the new version, it's still labeled as v1.2.0.5, even though the site says v1.2.0.4, the old file size was 16.9mb the new file size is 17.1mb, so I did and the problem is solved, all 4 of my once failed hard drives are now showing passed

Travis was very helpful and kept me informed, so as for the report of bad customer service from seagate I have to disagree, I was helped fast and the problem was solved fast, what could be better then that!!

So hats off to Seagate Support and to Travis!!!!! I would keep this thread sticky because how many people out there are still using the old version 1205 and getting failed results, please post that people should uninstall the old version and install the new, the new was put up yesterday 3-22-11.

[Goldpanners]

I must add to the above post that the skipping I was having was from a corrupt file I had on the hard drive, I erased all the data on the hard drive and re-installed it and it works like a charm, no pauses or skips or clicks of death, so far so good

[RedDwarf]

Thank you for your post Goldpanners. I use Win XP Pro SP3 as well and I RMA'd a drive because SeaTools 12.0.5 said it failed the SMART test. They granted the RMA and sent me a replacement drive which is older than the one I RMA'd. I have just installed the drive and tested it with SeaTools and it is claiming the drive is again failing the SMART check.

So did I RMA a good drive? Why on earth did they accept it as valid return if it wasn't faulty? I would of preferred my original drive if it wasn't faulty. I am not happy about this as I think I am worse off than when I started having an older drive than the one I had.

I hope that I get a reply to my email about this on Monday.

[RedDwarf]

The version 1.2.0.5 that I was using was the smaller 17,731,584 bytes 16.9MiB version. We do need to be careful as newer windows won't show it as being 16.9MiB they would show it as being  17.7MB.

The new version is 17,977,016 bytes 17.1MiB 18MB

The new version still says my new drive has failed the SMART test so it doesn't seem to make a difference to mine.

I have an older, 7 years old 250GB Seagate drive which passes the SMART check.

[RedDwarf]

I have tried it on 2 different windows XP installs on my PC, one with SP3 and the other with SP2 and the SMART check fails on both of them for the drive and passes for the other Seagate drive that I have.

On Windows 7 x86 the drive passes! So it looks like SeaTools isn't compatible/working with Windows XP. It also looks like the drive that I RMA'd was working and I wouldn't of RMA'd it if it wasn't for SeaTools misreporting!

[Goldpanners]

Smart check don't work on all drives, I was told by the tech that not all drives will show anything from that part of seatools, I have 4 of the 2tb external drives and none of them work with smart check, it just says "not available" but I pass the Short drive test and the Short generic and long generic, those are the ones that count.

And remember to completely remove the old seatools before installing the new version, I am running Win XP Professional SP3 and it works like a charm on my computer, Seagate don't really monitor these forums, if you really need help with your individual problems please e-mail or call them, they are excellent by e-mail on helping you and working through the problem, give them a chance and you will see they have excellent customer service

The most important test on there they said was the Long Generic, it took me about 5 hours to do that test on each of my 2tb hard drives and like I said they passed Goodluck

[Goldpanners]

The reason they gave you an RMA number is probably because when you failed a test you generated an error code that you had to give them,what made mine different is that I tested 4 hard drives and they all failed and gave me codes, that must have seemed weird to them, and I explained the software issue how all the drives passed an earlier version of seatools, and of course now the rest is history.

Give the e-mail customer service a try, it worked great for me

[RedDwarf]

SMART check should work on all drives that support SMART which should be most of them.

It seems to be windows XP that doesn't like SeaTools because the SMART check works fine on Win 7 and passes the drive but XP fails it. It's only a tiny drive meant for operating system use and not meant for any storage.

I cannot even format two primary partitions using XP disk management. I made three partitions using some partitioning software that I usually use, 2 for windows installs and a tiny Fat32 partition for Bios backups. The Fat32 partition I finally managed to format but the primary Ntfs partitions fail to format every time I try.

I didn't have this problem with my previous drive that I RMA'd. Something isn't right with it.

I have emailed them so hopefully they will respond on Monday.

[OldPCMan]

Thanks for your post! I was having a similar problem and thought it might to be the software when a the program failed on my 2nd One Touch Drive.

I downloaded & installed SeaTools-1205 on 03/19/2011, just  3 days before the program was fixed. The program worked great on internal drives but I just couldn't get it to work on any of my external drives.

I uninstalled the old version of 1205, downloaded & installed the new version 1205, and, except for the help files, the program worked flawlessly.

Now, if Seagate would just fix the help files, SeaTools will be great Hard Drive Utility Program for external drives.  (Help also did not work during the internal hard drive test.)

Thanks again for you're post, and thanks to Seagate for fixing the program.