Harddisk Failure? -- Part 2

2010, March 11 - 7:02pm — vyvy

(Part 1 is here if you haven't read it.)

Checked Again

A few hours ago, I connected my 'suspicious' Seagate 500GB harddisk to a motherboard of another computer. I fired up Palimpsest and checked the harddisk again. Oops, I got the same Last self-test FAILED (Read) error again. I repeated the test for a few more times and still got the same error.

I thought I couldn't do much with the harddisk already, so I started to shred [en.wikipedia.org] it. Why shred it? There were no sex videos on my harddisk, but these days you won't know how those weird people will make use of whatever irrelevant data you have in whatever ways beyond your imagination. So I just gave shred a few hours to do her job.

After shred-ing, I checked the harddisk again. I ran a self-test and re-ran both the short and conveyance self-tests for a few more times. Again and again, I got this:

But if it's ok now, how do you explain the error encountered before shred-ing? It's still a myth. (For 'convenience', when it's difficult or impossible to reproduce the same errors encountered before, engineers just label them as transient errors. :p)

So It's OK!?

While preliminary tests seem to say that my old Seagate is ok, it (or to fair, probably the motherboard) has fooled me into buying a new Western Digital, ha. I have not done a thorough test for the harddisk yet, and have lent it to my brother. Let's give it some time to see how well it can survive!