What to do with 4 broken 320GB seagate OEM drives?

[mcloughj]

Feel free to take the mick out of me for this but a month ago I was feeling in the mood for a bit of a gamble.

I spotted an ad on Ebay for 4 broken 320gb barracuda drives and thinking that it might be worth a punt at fixing them up and creating a 6 drive raid array for laughs! The other thing i was thinking that because they are 320gb seagates i know they should be still under warranty as they've been out less than 2 years.

Turns out the drives are shagged completely- none of the utilities i have will fix them up. The other thing is that seagate won't accept returns because they are OEM drives (taken from acer computers i think). I'm only down about 50 euro but does anyone have any idea what i could do? anyone ever do anything like this before?

Hell, if anyone here works in seagate and they are feeling generous i'll swap the 4 broken drives for two working ones!

And once again feel free to tell me what a bad idea this was! :laugh::shadedshu

Cheers!

[Pinchy]

Moral: do your research before you bid :p.

Whats wrong with the drives though?

[Solaris17]

are the drives picked up? will yuo send me one? :p

but ill help you fix them

[mcloughj]

Moral: do your research before you bid :p.

Whats wrong with the drives though?

Yep... lesson learned! I don't think i'll be doing this again anytime soon!:laugh:

Three of the disks are bricks- there's not a peep out of them when you plug them it, no detection in the bios. The other one can be detected but is in really bad condition- using seagate tools it shows bad sector after bad sector. Other utilities i've used (HDD Regenerator 1.51 from Hirens boot cd) only get about 1% into the drive before it crashes completely. I've tried other utilities from the boot cd but to no avail.

Xp doesn't detect the drive at all.

[mcloughj]

are the drives picked up? will yuo send me one? :p

but ill help you fix them

probably not worth the effort! I'm in Ireland so postage to you would cost a fair bit! thanks though!

[Solaris17]

try using spinright 6

[mcloughj]

try using spinright 6

A great utility alright, but it wouldn't detect the drive.

[goober]

You can always make hard drive speakers!!! :toast: http://youtube.com/watch?v=8GT2WrsCDmI :rockout

[hbkl]

You can always make hard drive speakers!!! :toast: http://youtube.com/watch?v=8GT2WrsCDmI :rockout

daaaammnnnnn that is crazy hahaha and funny at the same time

[Nitro-Max]

paper weights:laugh:

[paybackdaman]

try selling them on ebay again...somebody out there like you is bound to pick em up eventually. ;)

[guyguy]

can use them for baseballs...

[Grasshopper]

The hard drive speakers look like a good idea. I've one deep fried Maxtor 60GB on the shelf and looks like I'll have myself some fancy looking speker :)

Try the electronics of the half working HDD on the other 3 (if you didn't do it already), but first confirm if it is the same type. Best of luck.

[WhiteLotus]

yea - mix and match. you'll need a hell of a steady hand could take them apart untill you get all the working parts from each drive to make one working drive.

if it doesnt even pick them up, maybe some sort of power issue? tried to see if a power surge has taken them out? might be able to replace the fried bits for cheap.

[goober]

I still say you make them speakers.:rockout:

[mcloughj]

Some good ideas! I'm feeling adventurous so i might try swapping some bits around- i might get lucky... hell i can't make them any worse! :laugh:

[WhiteLotus]

Wont do any harm.

[Nitro-Max]

Just stick them in for show and kudos points no one will know expect us:laugh:

[Nitro-Max]

you could lap them and make fancy heavy duty hand mirrors for makeup application etc

[Wetbehindtheears]

I'd say use them as bookends or doorstops - I 'won' a bargain on eBay once, a 1Tb Lacie that was wonky but I' reckoned that it was probably one drive that was knackered (?), so I used the other 3 and junked the ton of (aluminium) case and the dodgey one!! :toast:

[Nitro-Max]

I got a VW camper novelty telephone which buzzed like mad with the audio.