SeaTools Freezes?

[bmgoodman]

Anybody have advice on using SeaTools to test a 6 month old Seagate 160 GB drive? My parents' Tivo had drive issues last July and I had to copy everything over to a new Seagate 160 GB. Late last year, their power supply quit, so they replaced the power supply. All has been good for several months, until yesterday when it appeared to freeze in Standby. Nothing would come to the screen. Rebooting go the the "Almost There" screen, but that is all. So I tried kickstart 57, 58, and 52 but never seemed to get anywhere. It booted one time to the Tivo Intro Music and immediately rebooted. After that, nothing but "Almost There".

I've now put the drive into a PC where I was able to get output from pdisk and mfsinfo. I then decided to run the same maketivobootable command as I did last summer (that fixed the old Maxtor drive long enough to get everything to the Seagate).

Now, the output of pdisk is:
Partition map (with 512 byte blocks) on '/dev/hda'
#: type name length base ( size )
1: Apple_partition_map Apple 63 @ 1
2: Image Bootstrap 1 1 @ 266316864
3: Image Kernel 1 8192 @ 266316865 ( 4.0M)
4: Ext2 Root 1 262144 @ 266325057 (128.0M)
5: Image Bootstrap 2 4096 @ 266587201 ( 2.0M)
6: Image Kernel 2 4096 @ 266591297 ( 2.0M)
7: Ext2 Root 2 262144 @ 266595393 (128.0M)
8: Swap Linux swap 260096 @ 266857537 (127.0M)
9: Ext2 /var 262144 @ 267117633 (128.0M)
10: MFS MFS application region 524288 @ 267379777 (256.0M)
11: MFS MFS media region 50770944 @ 215545920 ( 24.2G)
12: MFS Second MFS application region 524288 @ 267904065 (256.0M)
13: MFS Second MFS media region 64477184 @ 151068736 ( 30.7G)
14: MFS Third MFS application region 1024 @ 268428353
15: MFS Third MFS media region 151068672 @ 64 ( 72.0G)
16: Apple_Free Extra 44152431 @ 268429377 ( 21.1G)

To my untrained eye, these SEEMS reasonable.

I now want to run SeaTools to look for bad blocks. That's where my problems are. I boot from the CD, SeaTools sees and identifies the drive, but I cannot get either the quick or full diagnostics to run. It starts the test and seems to immediately stop.

So, is there any magic to getting SeaTools to run? Does this mean something is wrong with the drive? (This PC is old, so it doesn't see the full drive size. MaxBlast never had trouble on this machine checking Maxtor drives.) If you think the drive should be RMA'd, what do I tell Seagate? Just that the tests never finish?

I'd like to get them to cross-ship. I am considering trying to clone this disk to the refurb. Does this seem like a bad idea?

OK, I'm all over the place here, I know. I'm very busy at work for the next few weeks, so this has come at a terrible time. Help appreciated!

Thanks.

[bmgoodman]

Bueller? Anyone?

[tlphipps]

I'd recommend trying the Maxtor diag disc instead. I find it to be a much more reliable tool. And it will normally work on seagate drives as well.

But to be honest, based on your description, I'd say the drive is definitely failing. And yes, if you RMA it, you can just tell them you can't even get the diags to run on it at all.

[bmgoodman]

Thanks, tlphipps, for the tip. I had mistakenly assumed that the Maxtor MaxBlast software wouldn't run on non-Maxtor drives. At your suggestion, I ran the full test last night on the Seagate and it came back as good.

Thanks again!