Returning a Seagate Hard Drive for Replacement

This is a blog post from 2009. The information here is already out of date. Please contact your seller for updated details how to RMA a hard drive

Certified Repaird HDD

Problem

My 1TB Seagate hard disk drive died on me last July 21.

Cause

Hard drives randomly die for various reasons, from fired circuit boards to damaged magnetic platters. Anyone who has worked with computers should expect it to happen once in a while.

Solution

Thankfully, the RMA procedure for Seagate hard drives is well documented in a TipidPC post.

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Geek M&Ms Test

guess what I'm thinking

I believe I haven’t eaten M&Ms for years now because one of the first things that went into my head while popping those colorful chocolate candies into my mouth was something geeky.

See if you can figure out what I was thinking then using the picture above. It’s not that hard, but if you need a hint, look at the category under which this post is filed.

Polyglot Programming

no single language

In this day and age, knowing one programming language is not enough to develop software.

Take for example web development. You need to know at least 3 different languages to write a web application:

  1. HTML to provide a user interface.
  2. A web scripting language (e.g. PHP) and possibly a general programming language (e.g. JSP + Java, ASP.NET + C#) in order to process the data entered by the user.
  3. SQL so that you could save the data to a database.

Of course, these are just the bare bones of a web application. More practical web apps require the developer to know more technologies:

  1. CSS to make the interface more appealing and manageable.
  2. Javascript to make that interface more dynamic (a must in Web 2.0).
  3. Another markup language like XML and JSON to facilitate data exchange (e.g. for AJAX)
  4. A web framework to reduce the complexity of a large system.
  5. A scripting language to automate the build and testing of the system

Developing for corporate clients require even more technologies:

  1. Ways of interacting with services on other servers which, when listed down, looks like alphabet soup: SOAP, RPC, CORBA, SOA, etc.
  2. Various security protocols, with keys, certificates, and whatnot.

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Randomly Restarting PC

Problem

PC is randomly restarting once every day or two. I could replicate it easily by playing Call of Duty 4 for a couple of minutes.

Cause

I haven’t found the cause yet.

The most likely cause of the shutdowns would be overheating. I took a spare 120mm fan and put it inside the rig’s aluminum case.

Still shuts down when playing COD4.

Tried to double check the heating problem. I downloaded Orthos Stress Prime and Furmark to stress test the rig.

It doesn’t shut down even if the load is a lot higher than what COD4 does to the system.

Power supply problem? I highly doubt it because I’m using a Corsair HX 520 PSU. Just to make sure, I switched the rails used by the video card.

Still shuts down when playing COD4.

Maybe it’s the drivers. So I uninstalled the drivers then used DriverSweeper to scrub the drivers clean. Reinstalled the latest ++ATI Catalyst drivers.

Still shuts down.

Maybe it’s the video card itself. Besides, it is a factory overclocked video card. So I switched it with my old video card, an nVidia 8800GTS 320MB card. Of course, I re-scrubbed the drivers again.

Still shuts down.

Maybe it’s a memory problem. Ran memtest86+ using a Ubuntu installer cd I have lying around.

No memory errors.

—

At this point, the only possible cause for the shutdown I could think of right now is the motherboard itself. It is a quality motherboard, but even high-end devices can have defects later in their lifetime.

Before I could decide to replace the board, I have to try one last risky thing: flashing the mobo BIOS. Downloaded the latest version and flashed the BIOS with it.

Still shut down after 1.5 hours of COD4.

Looks like I’m going to have to buy a new one these next few weeks. Now the board itself is pretty stable and wouldn’t require replacement; I’m just worried that a random shutdown would affect the other hardware (e.g. the Seagate drive I had RMA’ed last week).

[August 14 Update:]

Solution

Bought a new motherboard to replace current one. This time, I was able to run through the first act of CoD4 without experiencing any crashes.