Could My New Drive Be Bad?

[ArtShapiro]

I just received an 80 gig Hitachi 7K100 unit from an eBay seller who had allegedly purchased it to replace a thought-failing disk that turned out to be OK. It had been unpackaged but never used.

Upon swapping it into the T42 and using Acronis 10.0 to copy the disk image I'd put out to an external drive, the new drive immediately begain giving LOUD clanks and thunks. Acronis ran for a while and then reported a disk error.

I then took a Windows XP CD, and attempted to partition and format it that way. Nothing happened at all - it saw the one 76 gig partition but wouldn't act upon it, giving no report at all.

I have one of those IBM external enclosures from DealExtreme (mentioned elsewhere in these forums) on order, but it won't be here for another 10 days. Obviously that would be my next approach.

Is there any way this drive could NOT be defective? Could I be overlooking something significant? I see it's under warranty until 11/08 but I'm not so sure they'll deal gracefully with someone who has no paperwork on the purchase.

Art, distressed

[pianowizard]

no paperwork on the purchase.

Don't worry, you don't need any paperwork. I broke a Hitachi laptop HDD last year and all I had to do was send Hitachi the drive and nothing else. I received a free replacement from Hungary in two weeks.

[Ken Fox]

I just received an 80 gig Hitachi 7K100 unit from an eBay seller who had allegedly purchased it to replace a thought-failing disk that turned out to be OK. It had been unpackaged but never used.

Upon swapping it into the T42 and using Acronis 10.0 to copy the disk image I'd put out to an external drive, the new drive immediately begain giving LOUD clanks and thunks. Acronis ran for a while and then reported a disk error.

I then took a Windows XP CD, and attempted to partition and format it that way. Nothing happened at all - it saw the one 76 gig partition but wouldn't act upon it, giving no report at all.

I have one of those IBM external enclosures from DealExtreme (mentioned elsewhere in these forums) on order, but it won't be here for another 10 days. Obviously that would be my next approach.

Is there any way this drive could NOT be defective? Could I be overlooking something significant? I see it's under warranty until 11/08 but I'm not so sure they'll deal gracefully with someone who has no paperwork on the purchase.

Art, distressed

What kind of ebay feedback did that seller have? Hard drives are just the sort of thing I'd dread to sell on ebay since they are easily damaged or fried if improperly handled and you never know what a buyer is going to do with it. From the standpoint of a buyer you never know what the seller did with it regardless of what he said.

The first thing I'd do is to contact the seller and tell him that the drive doesn't work properly. See what he offers you. Granted, you can ship it off for a replacement but at the least you are having to eat the shipping cost on the ebay purchase plus on sending the defective drive for a replacement. Try to get at least partial restitution from the ebay seller to cover your costs. If he'll take it back and refund all your expenses, and if you trust that he would actually do that, then send it back.

As to the basic question, dead or non-functioning hard drives are not hard to diagnose. I've seldom had problems early on with a hard drive where the cause proved to be anything other than a disk failure.