hardware or software problem?

i have a seagate baracuda sata drive. recently i was installing something that required a restart (i think it was ad-aware). Now that hard drive wont boot, nor can i run the vista repair utility on that drive, or install a fresh copy of vista. i have even downloaded an image (and burned it to cd) that has just the vista repair util on it to see if maybe my original media was ruined. but i got the same results. bios detects both the sata drive with the problem and the working ide drive.

right now i have an old xp disk in the machine that is stuck at Examining 476938 MB Disk 0 at id 0 on bus 0 on nvatabus...

anyone got any ideas before i call seagate back and try to teach an arabian to speak english....

 

i have also discovered that when this seemingly broken hdd is plugged in my computer will not boot into the working hdd.

 

ok, so i was able to clone my hdd using maxblast. ran into a few sector errors, didnt think anything of em. but, it seems thats the prob. so i am going to keep trying that until i get sick

 

Is this the drive you have?
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/374/1050374/seagate-barracudas-7200-11-failing

 

i have the oem 500 gig version of this drive. within the first 45 days of owning the drive (day 32 to be exact) it failed on me in a way that the bios would not identify the drive.

they replaced the drive (at my shipping expense) with a retail version that supposedly included the firmware update. the label on the drive itsself says says sd1a which is the "fixed" firmware.

if i wipe the drive clean using maxblast 5 (its old but thats what i got and it works) and format the entire drive to ntfs i am able to fire up windows from my spare 40 gig ide western digital and the seagate is identified by windows.

if i use the maxblast cloning feature it copies the partition from the old drive to the new one, but does not expand it, no matter what option i use. when i do this all seems to go through however when i attempt to boot the disk after selecting windows from grub and then selecting vista from the windows boot loader (both enabled for diagnostic purposes) it hangs. however this does not happen on the western digital which has an identical configuration minus the unalocated space at the end of the seagate.

i have tried xxclone however it does not detect my drives even though i have used this as well when i wanted to do a restore.

i am running out of ideas.

 

i have decided that since seatools does not identify this seagate drive that i would attempt to have the drive replaced for free as they replaced my original drive with a defective one. i talked to an agent named max who was very helpful and went out of his way to help me. he even offered to call me back once he got a reply from his supervisor, but that was not needed as he got a reply shortly after saying that.

they are sending me a return shipping label, and will send m a new drive once they get my current drive. i have taken note of the serial number to be sure that they do not send me the same drive.

please note that i never removed the limiter jumper until this problem showed its ugly face. despite the issues with this particular drive model i still prefer seagate over many drives because this is the only device this issue has happened on. i have a really old ide seagate that is still kicking. one bad drive model over 15 or 20 years or however long they have been in the business is not bad. its bound to happen some time.