My strange experiences with barracuda 80 gig

Right now as i type this message i am burning cd's of my data from corrupt 80 gig barracuda and life's been strange lately to me as far as this particular hard drive is concerned, keep in mind that i faced bad sector problems around 2 months back lost data and returned the drive in warranty got another seagate barracuda 80gig and right now the very same drive i am backing up

i faced a hard drive crash a couple of months back and couldn't recover anything and yet again as i am typing this message i am backing up data from my 80 gig which is filled with bad sectors

First time none of the recovery software worked for me and something rather wierd worked, i booted with windows 98 DOS mode and was manually able to copy EVERYTHING but booting in windows xp and windows 98 was giving me nothing, i have no explanation for that

Right now the hard drive i am backing up Seagate Barracuda 80GIG it was running on ultra ata 100 and it took me around 2 hours to boot to windows and come to desktop and even than there was constant activity of hard drive and i had to reboot my computer after about 15 mins of more waiting

What i did was (i don't know it was brain wave or something) i removed the drive from ultra ata channel and put it on normal ide channel and everything was back to normal and i was able to start backing up data although i lost around 7gig's of data

i guess there are something which one can't explain, or maybe there are things which i am not able to explain and someone else might be able to explain these apparantely wierd happenings with my computer

Just how hot is this drive? What is your mobo temp?

The HDD taking its sweet time booting, is offcourse its dying (I know my Seagate 80GB was dying like that). Did you try DiscWizard 2002 from Seagate, did it exceed the S.M.A.R.T threshold?

Also are you using good ATA 100 cable? They might be corrupting your data

oh computer runs very very hot indeed at stock speeds and using cooler master fan (7200 rpm) it runs at around 60C :|

SMART is disabled

ATA 100 cables are the one which came with my Asus motherboard

i am half way through with backing up data around 30 gb or so more to burn and its taking much longer to burn than usual since its taking its own time reading the drive

60C, I presume is the CPU your talking about right? If thats the HDD I can see why they die so easily, Seagate Site says for Baracuda IV 80GB its max should not exceed 60C.

And you should always keep S.M.A.R.T enabled and never ignore it. I got that on startup and ignored it and then tried to burn a DVD-R, it failed saying it could not read the file, thats when I found out. So was able to save everything as the HDD was getting slower and slower, but made it in time before its death.

oh thanks for the tip i read somewhere on net in a performance guide that SMART should be disabled to improve performance i am going to enable it from now onwards

took me a day to burn 30 cd's work is going on slow pace but something is better than nothing i guess