Is it dead???

[Noxide]

Last night I mod my wifes 80gig HDD Seagate Barracuda. I put a window in it. This is how i did it:
I did the hot shower step to get the dust out of the restroom and let the restroom cool with the door close. ( until no steam or condisation can form) i took the top cover off and put the HDD in a Rubbermaid tupperware quikly. I was off to to the deed. When I finished, I washed it, dried it, blew it off with an air compresser. Couldnt have been any dust. Put it back together... Tried it and a folder was corruped. Sooooooo...I used seagates utility cd and earased everything. Installed a fresh XP and all went smoothly. Now after the Windows XP logo, THE BLUE SCREEN! It just says it failed to boot and has been terminated. I tried clearing the Bios. Checked the wires, jumper, everything. But what puzzles me is that XP installed all the way. What do you guys think?

Hell It looks Cool though.
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Asus M2N32-SLI Deluxe, AM2 4600 x2, 150GB Raptor Exteme, 7900GTX in SLI Corsair XMS DDR2 CAS3, Custom DD Water Cooling

[Google]

[Silicon Skum]

I think your barracuda just turned into a dead fish.

Unfortunatly it doesn't take much to cause a HDD to die, even one MICRON sized dust particle can kill a HD platter or read / write head without much trouble. The HD window modding thing is increasingly more difficult to do the bigger the size of the drive, more data density means MUCH smaller tracks on the platter, weaker magnetic field strength and smaller drive heads.

You could *possibly* try a low level format on the drive, also a surface scan might be able to section off the bad or damaged sectors / clusters on the platter(s). Drive migt not last too long though.

Chances are slim the drive will ever be usefull again. If you want to mod a hardrive for use in a system where the drive will be on show, your best bet is to use a drive that is smaller than 10Gig, a 1Gig drive sould be fairly resiliant against damage by small particles, compaired to a modern high capacity drive. Besides which, the old drives are cheap and if you screw up it'll only cost you a few bucks, quid, dracma, yen, [insert currencey here] to replace it.

Good Luck

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[fussnfeathers]

If your bathroom is anything like mine.......it takes about 1/1000 millisecond for a piece of hair or dust to appear.

Yeah, I'm afraid it's probably dead. You mentioned that you put it in a Tupperware container quickly........two questions: Was that container in the bathroom when you did the "steam clean" (in which case, moisture inside the container corrupted the drive) and did you sterilize the container beforehand (if not, than a bit of dust inside the container probably landed on the platters).

The only place I'd mess with taking off the cover on a hard drive is an industrial clean room, and even then I'd be very careful.......I know, some people have had success with it, but there's too many variables. In my case, I have four cats. I find cat hair in jars of food I opened less than a second before. no joke. Not to mention skin particles, dust from your clothing, etc etc.
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Big enough to scare you

[ToggleHead]

was the tupperware container static proof...... i dont think they are?
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[[KoG]^weaZel]

thats a pretty trick paper weight you got there.

It would be kinda cool to put a colored LED in the side of it to show it off.

But anyways, I am surprized that you got as far as you did with it. You got very close to pulling it off.
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I tweaked and it tweaked back! So I Tweaked some more!

"Barney is like the Michael Jackson of PBS." - James Tybeerious

[Fitz Goran]

Just to verify that the drive is fubared I'd run the surface scan test of Seagates Seatools Desktop edition.

http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/

[Noxide]

I didnt leave the tupperwear in the bathroom while steaming. I did clean it. I dont have any pets and i clean the crap out of the bathroom. If anything i think static got to it.
MAN but it looks soooo cool though with the blue LED inside! The HDD had a hole on the side already and i just moved the aluminum tape and pushed the light into it....nice and snug. I'll try the surface scan. MAN THIS SUCK BUT LOOKS SO GOOD! ( Im glad i tried it on my wifes before my 200Gig WD ) <<ssshhh.... yal dont know what happend.
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Asus M2N32-SLI Deluxe, AM2 4600 x2, 150GB Raptor Exteme, 7900GTX in SLI Corsair XMS DDR2 CAS3, Custom DD Water Cooling

[Noxide]

ITS ALIVE!!!

Thanks Fitz for that light on the Seagate tools. I ran the drive utilities that came with the HDD. There were ALOT of bad sectors. But the tool zeroed the out to not be used again. I installed XP (Full HDD reformat not the quick one) and it worked! Gotta get the pics developed.
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Asus M2N32-SLI Deluxe, AM2 4600 x2, 150GB Raptor Exteme, 7900GTX in SLI Corsair XMS DDR2 CAS3, Custom DD Water Cooling

[[KoG]^weaZel]

Very sweet man!! Congrats on the mod. I cant wait to see the pics!
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I tweaked and it tweaked back! So I Tweaked some more!

"Barney is like the Michael Jackson of PBS." - James Tybeerious

[Silicon Skum]

heh, congrats!

I would be VERY carefull about storing any data on this drive that you would not want to loose. give it a month or two to work out any remaining bad areas and if it's still fit and well, then you should be OK.

Ya know, this reminds me of the days of the 20Mb hard drive (ceramic platters!) there was a cool trick you could do with a "dead" drive to "zombie" it into life one last time.
I was working at the County Council IT section, had a call out to a typist / secretarry or something who had an OLD 286 macine as their main computer. The hard drive had gone bad and was just clicking and buzzing as it failed to read the MBR, there was some VERY important data on the drive they needed ASAP. The only thing I could do was the zombie trick, which meant I basically opened the hard drive up, turned the computer on and and pushed down lightly on the read / write head with my finger to get the drive to BOOT for that last time. It didn't give you long, just long enough time to copy data off the drive, before the drive crapped out.
Always nice if the bearings of the drive failed at the same time, that final SCCCRRRRRRRREEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAACHC CHC CHH CH CHHHHH *CLICK* sound as it bit the dust.

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