Cav's Place

I hoped I’d be back to “normal” yesterday, after finally getting a replacement for that failed HDD on Wednesday. It didn’t work out, because the “new” drive was dead on arrival… I just put it in, turned the computer on, heard four rather ugly sounds and saw the system hang while trying to detect it, eventually displaying the model number followed by that same “drive verify failed” message that I was getting after the first one would lock up. Tried putting it on dad’s computer as well and that one wouldn’t even bother with it, spending a couple of seconds trying to detect it and then just moving on. So they kept it for 15 days just so they could replace one that was dying when it was trying to read from a certain area with one that was quite thoroughly dead. They were much quicker the second time around though, replacing it after just one day with a third one, which so far is working.
Considering all the bad reviews I have read about this particular model and since the first failed after a year and a half and the second was dead on arrival, I certainly won’t start installing Windows on it before making sure it passes all the tests and I plan to keep backing up regularly and thoroughly from now on. I also advise everyone to stay away from model number ST3500320NS (Barracuda ES.2 SATA 3.0-Gb/s 500-GB) from Seagate… I made a bad choice when I decided to buy this and now I guess I have to live with it, so I can only hope that this one will be better than the first one (since it’s obviously better than the second one already). I did notice that the first one’s firmware version was SN04 and, despite the fact that no updates for it were listed when I checked, this one has SN06, so that could help too…

It just passed the first, and likely most thorough, test, so it looks hopeful, but I still think I’ll spend tonight running tests on it and making sure I have the latest versions of all drivers and programs that I plan to install, then install Windows and everything else on it tomorrow if all goes well. And I sure hope it’ll all go well, because computer problems really get my morale down and make me worry even more than I usually do. Being somewhat excited about finally getting out of this temporary situation and then finding myself back to square one on Wednesday evening triggered a really bad moment…
Still, either way it goes, I won’t be writing anything more about it this week, because I have no more “slots” left for personal posts, but a “report” will most likely be here on Monday, after I’ll somehow manage to write a post about something non-personal this weekend… If things go well, my computer should be completely back to normal by then. If not, I’ll certainly know it all too well much sooner than that…