SeaTools, if you weren’t already aware, is Seagate’s self-booting hard disk diagnostic software which it provides for its Barracuda and Maxtor drives. After examining the drive for less than a minute, SeaTools declared that the drive was physically damaged and needed to be replaced. A depressing but not entirely unexpected turn of events.

Now, I live out in the sticks, which means that if I’m to attempt an acquisition of computer hardware at a decent price it has to be ordered from out of town and typically takes about a week to get here. Since I planned to reinstall Windows on the replacement drive, I felt it unnecessary to install it anywhere else before it gets here which meant I had to spend the week on Ubuntu.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Linux (or perhaps more accurately, I have a certain degree of respect for Linux), but it’s not something that I have a huge amount of experience with or something that is of particular use to me. Most of my games and software are not Linux compatible, for instance, and while I am perfectly aware of the existence of software packages such as Wine, it seems like a lot of trouble to go to when I’m just going to be back on Windows in a matter of days anyway. Being on a Linux distro for a few days was enough for me to learn a bunch of things though, like the fact that Firefox is complete rubbish. As I’m an IE user that might sound like zealous ignorance, but I’ve always been of the opinion that Firefox was a good alternative until I was actually forced to use it for an extended period of time. It does all sorts of silly things like freezes when trying to view a large SVG file; I thought surely this must be me but after talking to some other people it seems the problems are quite prevalent. A friend encouraged me to try Google Chrome and it’s a much smoother alternative, so I’ll keep that in mind whenever I have to revisit Linux. IE has certainly had a whole spectrum of problems in the past, but at least it has shown gradual improvement from version to version (the latest of which I think is more or less on par with the other browsers) whereas Firefox appears to be getting more bloated. While still on Linux I managed to back up 99% of the important data from damaged drive before it finally failed completely.

During the week I was on Linux I also contracted gastroenteritis which made staying awake and doing more or less anything utterly exhausting and it refused to go away until I got a prescription of antibiotics leading me to believe that it was bacterial rather than viral.

Not that it was easy to get a prescription, mind you. As I’ve established earlier, I live out in the middle of nowhere, and when I got to the hospital there was only one doctor present in A&E which meant I had to wait 5 hours or so on the worlds hardest mattress before being seen. I did get better on the antibiotics though, which is something.

After a few days back at home, my new drive arrived and promptly started showing signs of failure.

It's so shiny!

It was, more or less, at this point that I concluded perhaps jamming forks into my eyes would be a less painful alternative to dealing with this computer. Nevertheless, I spent a significant amount of time diagnosing the issue. The drive would work for a while and then suddenly become unresponsive. It would spin up and then stop with a click sound, over and over again until either the operating system or the SATA controller decided it was not worth talking to anymore, which suggests either a power or mechanical problem (my money being on the latter). I booted up SeaTools once more and ran the long test, which worked for about 44 minutes before stopping abruptly and falling back to the FreeDOS CLI. The drive had cut out again in the middle of the test.

I fiddled with my hardware configurations and made sure all the cables were nice and snug, then ran the SeaTools long test a second time.

Now if you’re particularly thick, you might not immediately realize that the long test takes a long time. SeaTools will examine every single sector on the disk and it can do this at around 250000 sectors per second. The problem lies in the fact that a 1TB drive such as the one being scanned contains roughly 1.96 billion sectors which means the test takes about 2 hours and 20 minutes to complete. After running through the test successfully, I decided to change my hardware configuration back to the way it was before and run the test again. It completed successfully in roughly the same amount of time.

Now, if a disk is under heavy load for nearly 5 hours straight and every single sector of that disk is accessed, you can conclude with a reasonable level of certainty that a problem such as the one previously described is no longer present.

When discussing this issue I was told that the likely source of the problem was a small mechanical defect caused during manufacture, which was simply worn down after heavy use of the drive; not unlike loosening a rusty hinge by working it hard. This makes sense given my conclusions in the previous paragraph and the fact that I have not had any problems with the drive since.

The scrollwheel on my mouse has started playing up and I think I might be getting sick yet again. All in all, these past few weeks have not been particularly pleasant ones. Having said that I do hope to get back into updating this site once more.

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