IBM 75GXP DELL!! Warranty 1

[paparazi]

I did a silly thing last week!
I bought a brand new IBM 45.1gig Deskstar 75GXP from a Market.
It was sealed in it's antistatic bag along with another 10-15 drives all in an OEM box (sponge slots for seperate drives)I was told they were bankrupt stock.
Guess what!! the drive won't format, it squeels every 2-10secs and clicks and knocks, basically buggered.
The drive although only bought last week has a manufacture date of Sept-2000 which means it should still have 16months warranty left but when I rang up IBM they said the drive wasn't there responsibility as it had been supplied to DELL OEM.
DELL say they don't sell components and it's an IBM drive so they don't want to know!
I know now that this drive, 75GXP had a recall or something on it, but what can I do??
The market trader has long since gone and neither IBM or DELL accept there responsibility for the warranty.
Any ideas guys?? I am desperate. Martin Just trying to help, sometimes falling short, I am only human after all.

 

[ANFPS26]

They call them "computer shows" here. Sometimes you can pick up a bargain, but a lot of times you are buying "a pig in a poke" and you are left holding the bag. I hope you didn't spend a lot of money on this drive. I feel your pain, but I'm afraid you may be stuck on this one. "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing....."

 

[ANFPS26]

You might read this:

http://www.tech-report.com/news_reply.x/2799/4/

"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing....."

 

[paparazi]

Since my original post I have tried to Email IBM storage, but the mail just won't send? I have tried 3 times now across a 12 hour period.
I figure as there has been a recall or reliability issue on this range of drives they should offer me a goodwill exchange or something??
Any more ideas??
Has anyone sucessfuly repaired one of these drives?? or is there a common fault or component that fails? does anyone know? Martin Just trying to help, sometimes falling short, I am only human after all.

 

[Snickle]

Not much consolation but I ran into a Gateway computer last month with a bad hard drive. Normally the warranty from the drive maker is 3 years but in this case the end-user did not buy the extended warranty from Gateway. The drive therefore only had a 1-year warranty [OEM] and was 4 months out of warranty. Bottom line: depends on what you pay for.

 

[paparazi]

I have decided it makes a very attractive and expensive door stop.
Just trying to help, sometimes falling short, I am only human after all.

 

[ANFPS26]

Take it apart and see if you might could fix it. "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing....."

 

[Guest_imported]

Stay away from this drive if you want reliability.

Get a Maxtor instead.


Remember what IBM stands for as well: I Buy Maxtor!

 

[Puddles]

Have got a solution for the IBM 60/75GXP Click error:

Scenario:-
The hard drive goes belly up, the dreaded clicking sound and no amount of scandisks or formating will recover it.
Sound familiar ?
Well get yourself to the IBM site and download the drive fitness test

http://service.boulder.ibm.com/stor.../dft32-v230.exe

(Windows flavour)
and the IBM feature tool

http://service.boulder.ibm.com/stor...ool-install.exe

(Windows flavour)
Other OS's catered for on the IBM Drive site.
These should each create a bootable floppy.

Run the drive fitness test.
My HD made the most horrible squealing noises at this point, came back with sector errors, interface errors and unknown errors !?????
I tried to wipe it with the zero all sectors option, with no sucess. Note: this is also useful if you have an NTFS partition and you want to get rid of it !.

This should tell you if your drive is indeed duff, normaly, it would be time to relegate it to the trash bin.
Not necessarily so.

Now boot up off the other disk (IBM feature tool).
In the options, switch both read and write ahead caching off, set the acoustic level down to minimum, this I believe slows the head seek movement down and I also had the power saving set to HD slow down rpm in power saving mode.

Now Boot off the Drive fitness disk again and zero all the sectors, with luck, it will now work.
Why? I can only assume that the drive loses track of where it is on the platter due to a dropout of formatting information on the disk, and with the high speed of the head positioning arm, it misses the track.
Slowing everything down gives it a chance to find the correct track sector etc.

You may be wondering why I suspect this is the problem?
I had a complete system failure using this HD some time ago, luckily I managed to track down the faulty file and replace it. Upon closer examination of the file, I found that a track worths of zeros had mysteriously appeared in the middle of it. It would indicate, that whilst writing the data to the HD, it skipped a track, but upon reading at bootup, it read it alright.
Also the squealing noise is the head positioning system desperately trying to move the heads to the next track, which the HD knows exist, but does not know that the head mechanism has already got to the physical end of it's travel, since it has skipped tracks.

If it zero's OK, do an advanced test just for good measure.
Boot up off the IBM feature tool disk, set all the caches back on and the speeds up to full, acoustic levels to loudest (max performance).
Once done, you should have a fully working IBM Hard disk again!.

I have ran test after test on mine and am using it again without a single glitch !.

At the moment, I don't know if this is a temperature related fault so I have fitted mine into cooldrive 2 cases just in case, it may be worth testing a drive with the temperature monitor utility on one of the bootable floppies to see what sort of uncooled temperature these drives can get too, then artifically heating the drive to the same temp, NO NAKED FLAMES !, then run Scandisk or some other utility to carry out a surface test on the Drive.
It may be worth leaving the acoustic level down a notch or two if the HD plays up again, this will of course slow the seek times down a little, but I hardly think you would notice it.

 

[Snickle]

Sorry, Puddles, but neither of those links work. Don't seem to be complete.

 

[Snickle]

Did some browsing, here is the IBM index:

http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/support/index.htm

And this is the actual download page:

http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/support/download.htm

 

[Puddles]

Indeed the links are not complete, sorry for that and thanks for the corrections.

 

[Snickle]

You're welcome, glad to help.

 

[PhiloVance]

From Paparazi
when I rang up IBM they said the drive wasn't there responsibility as it had been supplied to DELL OEM.

Funny, a number of years ago we'd bought a piece of IBM hardware for our mainframe shop. It was a 6611, sort of an early router. Couple of years went by and we had problems. The tech said you need to upgrade your software and he gave me the version and release. I tried to order it and IBM wouldn't take the order, said "You don't own a 6611". I said, "I beg your pardon!!". Turned out I had to fax the original paperwork to IBM for them to 're-enter it in the database'.

Paparazi: moral of the story is, don't believe everything IBM says. PhiloVance
Other hobbies, interests: Travel, Model RR (HO Gauge), Genealogy.

 

[gzinn]

It's "back to your search engines" time! The above links have been torpedoed by IBM because:
"IBM Storage Technology has merged with Hitachi Storage to become Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. To visit us and find out more

http://www.hgst.com.

"

 

[pmonett]

I've also had a problem with an HDD, a Seagate. I had bought it at a shop and it went belly-up after only ten months.
The shop had closed, but Seagate just told me that it was an OEM disk and I had to deal with my retailer.
I wonder just how legal that is.

 

[firewolfrl]

the Hitachi download page:

http://www.hgst.com/hdd/support/download.htm

 

[paparazi]

Nearly a year old now guys, thought this one was dead and buried, a mistake I would rather forget. Martin

Replying helps further our knowledge, without comment leaves us wondering.