[tlug] Seagate Sudden Death....

["Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon" <ronfaxon@example.com>]

First, the news.  An 80GB Seagate drive, not heavily used, and only two 
years old has suddenly died.  Yesterday it was slow to boot up and today 
it doesn't do anything past the BIOS other than make "zzzzzzzzzz - 
click, click - zzzzzzzzz chick, click - zzzzzzzzzz" noises, and then 
displays:

"strike F! to retry boot, F2 for setup utility"

- all the while continuing the "zzzzzzzzzz - click, click - zzzzzzzzz 
chick, click - zzzzzzzzzz" noises.

Now, for some background on this issue:

Some time back I posted a question regarding strange noises that my 
IBM/Hitachi hard drives were making and we eventually worked out the 
following:

1) Some older IBM hard drives had a record of suddenly dieing - 
apparently caused by the head(s) physically sticking to the platter(s).

2) Apparently a new design periodically moves the head assembly to 
prevent this from happening - thus the strange noises.

So, thanks to everyone who helped solve that mystery last time and I 
have news to report about a Seagate drive.

I use a set of computers running through a KVM switch.  This does eat up 
space and the wiring looks like a rat's next, but it provides some benefits:

A) Redundancy.  A catastrophic failure of any once device isn't too big 
of an issue - you just shift whatever you were doing on that machine to 
another one already running through the same keyboard/monitor/mouse 
(hopefully all important data will have been already backed up!).

B) For a heavy user of computers who spends too much time using them but 
is always short of time to study them, having different OS's running in 
parallel enables the continued use of old much beloved application 
software that doesn't run on newer setups.

Now, back to the dead Seagate drive.  The only thing out of the ordinary 
I've done with the machine is to make some audio recordings from a set 
of tapes that I first recorded as .wav files and then converted to MP3.  
Is there something particularly hard-drive-destroying about doing this 
sort of thing (about 15 hours of recording over five days)?  Or is it 
just a case of the oh-so-important hard drive just prematurely kicking 
the bucket?

And - other Seagate hard drive users out there - have you had any 
trouble with your drives?

Lyle