Over the lenght of about 1 1/2 years, my Seagate 120gb hard drive had been overheating drastically...and I don't mean 10 or so degrees above normal, my hard drive was hitting 150+ degrees ferheneit. Because of this, I modded my computer case to make it run cooler, I added 3 fans, a window, temprature probes, and of course some of my own blood, doing this made my hard drive temperature drop to 95 idle (average) and 135 (after opening several programs)

After getting the tempuratures lowered, I noticed several problems, Photoshop (in windows) giving read errors when opening a file, or when saving, I noticed several problems in games, they would constantly stop, and the continue, making it extremely aggrevating to play UT2004, or Battlefield 1942. When I first built the computer I had Red Hat 9 and Fedora Core 1 installed, and I could never boot without a boot disk (always got a grub read error), I never realised the seriousness of an overheating hard drive until around 3 months ago when I started to run my computer without a side panel and started looking at all the stuff that goes on, and my index and middle finger lost there fingerprints when I touched the hard drive

Just recently:
I have noticed (in Debian Linux) that programs, and some tasks will refuse to run at times, sometimes I can't even login, recieving an error of unknown username or password (I checked, and double checked the username and password, both were correct), the only way I could get logged in was to restart the X server, or if that didn't work, I would have to do a hard reboot (root password wouldn't be recognized either), and when logged in, Firefox and Mozilla Suite when trying to download something (been trying to get the latest FF version) will completely freeze with no error message, and I would have to kill the program, at times FF and/or Mozilla wouldn't even start, this also happens with amaroK, Gaim, gnome-PPP, gDesklets, gnome-panel, gnome-session, and nautalis...so far these are the only programs that I have noticed to have problems, but I really haven't tested much.

The question itself!:
Are all these problems related to a shitty hard drive? and can/will they be fixed if I get a new hard drive? (I am looking at a 250gb SATA drive on newegg.com)

btw, the only reason I can boot my computer is because of an old 8gb hard drive I got from a client computer, and right now is completely filled from windows, and windows updates (less than 200mb left), the only other thing on the drive is Grub data so that I can boot into windows and Linux.


Any help is greatly appreciated, no matter how dumb, short, or just plain mean ...also, sorry for such a long post, just trying to get out all the problems that are going and the such

Sounds like a serious problem. It does indeed sound like drive failure.

My first question is why have you not returned it to seagate for warranty repairs? Seagate commonly has 5 year warranties on their drives. I would go to this link:

http://support.seagate.com/customer/...validation.jsp

and have your drive's serial and model numbers on hand to check if your warranty is still valid.

No matter what drive maker that drive came from, if it's been having a high tempurature problem for a while, then it sounds like manufacturing error to me.

My disk drives don't commonly get hot, the most is a higher end of warm to the touch. Never anything that would possibly burn...(150 F should be enough to burn you)

I don't have a serial number for the hard drive, is it located on the hard drive itself? if so, where?

Yes it is located on the drive. Look on the label.

From the Seagate site:

For the model number:

Hope that helps.

I found the serial number, and got the drive validated, and the site says that the warrenty ran out in July, 2005

That sucks... Well now you know how to do it if this sort of thing happens to you again!

...let's just hope it doesn't happen again! ...and never will I buy a Seagate drive again (4 client computers had drive failures...all were seagate, and all were around 1-2 years old >_>)

Well, that's where the 5 year seagate warranty is supreme. Maxtor only has a 1 year, Western Digital I think has 3.

Just make sure you actually go through with the warranty next time(it will happen, I've had 4 maxtors go on me in the last year alone). They provide them for a reason.

Sorry you've had so much troubles with the seagate. I love mine. It's all I use now.

yes, the warrenties kick ass...just kinda wish I had remembered it

and thinking about it, I have realised that this can be a good thing, buying a new 250gb SATA drive, will let me run windows and Linux on one drive, and I get more space (I have already filled both my drives >_<)