ERROR 2100: HDD0 [SOLVED]

[hellosailor]

I've gotten a black screen (just like DOS) and error message a couple of time, about once per week, since I upgraded to a Seagate Momentus 5400.6 (500GB/5400rpm) hard drive. The machine has also made a "gnurr..gnurrr...gnurrr...CLICK" sequence of noises about four times, which is the sound of a rotary mechanism grinding and then parking or locking up. After the second gnurr sequence and error message, I called Seagate to ask for warranty replacement, and they said yes, don't risk it.

Seagate shipped me an advance replacement on May 7th, which took a week to arrive by 2nd day UPS (don't ask) which was a reman drive with bad sectors that would not format and clone. Discussed this with them and they said don't risk it, we'll ship you a second replacement drive. Which took another week and again failed their diagnostics and would not clone. So...last week they were supposed to ship me a third replacement drive.

I'm now waiting for the third drive, which shipped three or four days after "we'll get that out to you this afternoon" and as a result won't arrive until Tuesday, then I just need to tie up the machine for a day or two to check out the third replacement drive, which puts it into next weekend again.

So I'm wondering...has anyone else had problems with Seagate or their Momentus 500GB drives lately? Seems like they are swamped to the point of not being able to qc their own warranty drives, much less their new ones.

And I'm also wondering, has anyone had ERROR 2100 come up this way? The MS explanations of it are fairly wide, but it seems to mean that the computer has lost communications with the hard drive, for unknown reasons. Seagate's first suggestion was 'reseat the drive" because in their experience it can literally mean a drive has come loose, but that didn' thelp here. (I'm still running the original 500GB drive, since both replacements failed to format and clone.) With crossed fingers and frequent backups.

SOLVED: The fourth Seagate drive passed all diagnostics and the system has been running well since drive #4 was installed. the error message apparently indicates a hard drive failure.