I have a Seagate Barracuda 160gb (st3160021a) HDD that i have been given to have a look at, but in all the time i've been fixing computers, i'll be damned if i know whats wrong with this one.

What happens is, If i put this HDD into any computer with the right jumper settings and everything, all the computer does is sit's there for age's and slowly trys to boot. doesn't matter if its from this drive or another, if this drive is in the computer, everything slow almost to a stand still.

I've tried running seagate diagonitic tools, but even then it take about 15-20 mins to boot from a floppy and then the program says the is a prob with the drive.

This is a OEM drive that came out of a Medion PC. One of those from Alde i belive.

Does anyone hve any idea or come across this prob before, Or maybe has a Flash program for it.

Any help would be helpful. Thanks

What OS's have you used for these "tests"?
Have you updated the SB's BIOS for INT 13 compatibility?

I would anticipate that you would have difficulty with this drive in most Windows environments, other than WIN 2k and XP on a machine with an up to date BIOS.

Do the Seagate diagnostics you have tried to use come on a separate diskette with a special OS included, or are you attempting to boot into a Windows environment? I encourage you to contact Seagate and see if they have a tool set with a compact, special purpose OS environment included that allows you to avoid Windows during the diagnostics.

The fact that you are attempting to boot the machine from "a floppy" leads me to think you may have an OS that cannot support access to drives as large as 160gb, unless it is a special OS provided by Seagate. What gives? More info needed.

Any Windows OS environment you attempt to use this drive in must be able handle drives as large as this one. While Win 2k and XP should be able to do so without special adjustments, but if the BIOS environment does not support INT 13 extensions, they will not.

Please provide more information about your environment, and details about the history of this drive and the problem solving routines you have already run for it.

Thanks for the reply. I'm using XP pro, and the PC it came out of was using XP Home before it crashed and left the drive in the state. there was no obvious damage to the drive or PC. if fact everything else in the PC works fine, its just HDD that's f**ked. The only reason i was booting from a floppy was booting up the diagnostics program for he drive.

Remove the offending HDD from the machine.

Make sure your AV software is up to date and run a full system check (with the offending drive NOT in the machine). Do the same with Ad Aware and Spybot S&D, in addition to whatever other anti-malware programs you are running.

Go into BIOS setup and make sure that the INT 13 extensions are enabled there. If they are not, enable them. If it's not clear from the BIOS interface, resort to MoBo and BIOS documentation to find out how to do that.

If the machine is so old that INT 13 support was not included in the BIOS, you will have to update your BIOS.

For the time of being, you will set your BIOS startup seek sequence to start from the floppy first, then your installed HDD. While you may want to leave the CD drive in the startup sequence, you will EXCLUDE or omit all HDD's other than your known good HDD from the startup sequence.

The interface and procedures for this vary with BIOS, and BIOS settings are not something you want to make mistakes with. So read the instructions you can find for your MoBo and BIOS about this and keep records of what changes you make and how you made them.

You did not say whether the diagnostics program for the drive was obtained from Seagate, and that it is supported by a special OS environment. I have to assume both are true.

With the offending drive NOT in the machine, and the first start sequence device set to the floppy, boot to the Seagate drive diagnostics. Listen to and watch the machine to note its behavior during the boot sequence, and verify that it is booting first from the floppy, and boots to Seagate's diagnostics OS and applications.

Shut down, remove the floppy, and boot again - this time from your normal and good HDD into XP.

If you have left the CD in the startup sequence, after the HDD, you would need to remove the HDD or change its place in the sequence so that it is accessed before the HDD in booting. (You might want a CD based boot option when running XP.)

At this point your machine is booting from the floppy first, has INT 13 enabled, and has been verified to be booting normally when the 160Gb Seagate is NOT in the machine.

There is a possibility that the offending drive is not responding properly to the BIOS polling of boot devices, and that is why the boot is delayed. This failure to respond could be because of the lack of INT 13 support, or because of a failing drive. The goal is to prevent the INT 13 supported BIOS boot sequence from including any polling of the offending drive while it is installed.

Physically disconnect the machine from any network or internet connections.

Install the offending drive, making sure that it does not somehow become the primary HDD designated as a boot device. If I were doing this, I would have entered BIOS and disabled ALL HDD's as boot devices for this test.

Insert the floppy and boot the machine. If the steps taken have prevented BIOS polling of the offending HDD, the diagnostics OS and applications on the floppy should be normally available to you.

Run the diagnostics on the offending drive.

Let us know what your results are.

I have a Seagate Barracuda 160GB ST3160021AS, and never had a problem, tho WIN XP Pro finds it easy.
One can easily download a diagnostics program from Seagate.
If one's puter can handle it
If he doesn't want that drive I'll take it.

That is reassuring. I've not used a drive larger than 120; had no problems with it, except that it's a USB external drive and the setup was a little unfamiliar to me on the Win 98 side.

I suspect there is a physical problem with the drive Mik is attempting to use, which is causing it to not respond properly to boot polling, rather than failing completely. Maybe he'll check in and give us more information.