Bad sectors on new Maxtor

[BigChin]

Hey all,

I bought a new Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 80GB drive about 3 weeks ago (model 6Y080P0 - 8MB cache). Today when I turned the comp on it was taking forever on the XP loading screen, then it started running Chkdsk. I noticed it picked up quite a few orphan fragments, and some other stuff. So it rebooted and Windows loaded but still very slowly. I decided to get it to run Chkdsk again, and again some more (but fewer) errors. Finally a third time it brought up nothing, and booting was as quick as before. However, now I have 100KB in bad sectors. :(

Chkdsk report:
40041980 KB total disk space.
14595600 KB in 42703 files.
12724 KB in 1984 indexes.
100 KB in bad sectors.
119536 KB in use by the system.
65536 KB occupied by the log file.
25314020 KB available on disk.

4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
10010495 total allocation units on disk.
6328505 allocation units available on disk.

What should I do? I haven't long finished installing all the software and getting everything to how I like it and now I could be looking at an RMA. Very annoying.

I was thinking I should leave it a while and see if any more bad sectors develop, as then I could think the drive was dying. You don't expect this after only 3 weeks.

[soupnazi]

The sooner you RMA, the sooner you can get it back. The bad sectors won't get better.

Have you tried contacting the place you bought it from and returning/exchanging it?

[Royal Oaks]

Yeah, just talk to the place you bought it from before anything else. If you RMA with Maxtor it is gonna take at least 2 weeks probably before you get a replacement. Just tell the place you bought it from it has some bad sectors, and they will probably just ship out a replacement. :)

[BigChin]

Yeah, I think you guys are right.

After it developed bad sectors yesterday I ran PowerMax on it today (after having to switch from IDE to Serial ATA since PowerMax doesn't currently work with nForce boards and IDE). It gave me back a 6 digit error code, and that basically tells me the drive is not well.

Maxtor do an advanced RMA service where they will ship me a new drive first and I then re-use the same packaging to send the defective one back within 30 days. Pretty good I reckon, minimal downtime (assuming my drive doesn't die completely before the new one arrives).

I've applied for an RMA. They may ask me to do a low level format first and see if that fixes it but we'll see.

[soupnazi]

Yeah, I highly doubt that a low level format would fix it. Even if it "says" it did fix it, I would still send it in for RMA.

[gateways_rule]

Yeah I would also send for an RMA. I had a problem like this with my first WD 160GB that I had. It was 4 weeks old, with 75GB of music videos and music on it, and it started giving me all kinds of bad sector errors. It was totally freaking me out and I was so mad. Fortunately, I didn't have to wait for a replacement or anything. I could just return the hard drive and get another one since it was less than 30 days old. :)

[coolqf]

Originally posted by gateways_rule
Yeah I would also send for an RMA. I had a problem like this with my first WD 160GB that I had. It was 4 weeks old, with 75GB of music videos and music on it, and it started giving me all kinds of bad sector errors. It was totally freaking me out and I was so mad. Fortunately, I didn't have to wait for a replacement or anything. I could just return the hard drive and get another one since it was less than 30 days old. :)

Dan, downloaded 75GB of music and videos under 30 days?

[BigChin]

Originally posted by Royal Oaks
If you RMA with Maxtor it is gonna take at least 2 weeks probably before you get a replacement.

Heh, nope. Applied for an advanced RMA on Tuesday, got my new drive today (Thursday). Two days is a lot better than two weeks. :)

It would have actually taken longer if I'd sent it back to the online retailer, probably around a week (thats how long they took last time I RMA'd something). And that way I would have been without a hard drive, and so unable to use my computer during that time. Advanced RMA solves that and allows you to simply copy all your data from drive to drive rather than backing up to CDR.

Thumbs up to Maxtor, excellent returns service! :)