Maxtor/(seagate) 320GB SataII burnout

[sg1]

I installed a system the other day and everything was fine and the customer was very happy with his new AMD Athlon x2 , 6000 system.

But during install of their 320GB HDD, XP setup was only showing the disk at around the 170GB size!!!! and then during the actual XP install it encountered a cyclic redundecy error!!.

I then went to install XP from a different XP disk and all went well, but after remoting into their system yesterday and installing speedfan for them, the HDD was running at 50oC idle!!!, then ten minutes later, they phoned me up to say smoke was pouring out of the pc .
*farm3.static.flickr.com/2357/2074119759_cd79974b05_o.jpg
as you can see(bit blurry) the sata connector has shorted out on the two centre pins of the HDD circuit board!!!

Is this a common fault or/and a good case for returning drive for replacement?

All the rest of the hardware is fine because it's now working with an old IDE drive for now .

 

[Gigacore]

oh.. thats really sad sg1..

i think u should somehow make the vendor to believe that fault was with the HDD.. and not with urs..

and get it replaced

 

[sg1]

oh.. thats really sad sg1..

i think u should somehow make the vendor to believe that fault was with the HDD.. and not with urs..

and get it replaced

I'm not going to lie if the fault was with the customer I just wondered if anyone else has had the same issue and are aware of the possible cause.

 

[dOm1naTOr]

Maybe the prints[connections] on the PCB was bery weak at that point. So it burned out. U can 90% get warranty.
I got warranty even for my older HDD which went dead after it fell of my hand.

 

[assasin]

@sg1 generally warranty is void in burn cases.so chances r bleak.

 

[fun2sh]

why wil the warranty be void ???
after all it got burnt due to some fault in the harddisk itself so the company has to repalce it with the othe one.

 

[sg1]

why wil the warranty be void ???
after all it got burnt due to some fault in the harddisk itself so the company has to repalce it with the othe one.

You are right M8,
We(myself and the customer) took it back to the shop and he replaced it without question, apparrently it has happened to him a couple of times too in the last 9 years or so

 

[dOm1naTOr]

@sg1
is there any earthing problem? if then it wud happen

 

[sg1]

@sg1
is there any earthing problem?

Nope.... no earth problem , all componants were brand new and installed and working correctly at time of dispatch to the customer , plus I always get the customer to see it all working before they take it away in case they KILL it on the way home usually by putting it in the boot of the car(BIG MISTAKE ).

I have NEVER had a HDD drive go on me before in the way this one did for the customer, I still think it could be their fault because they told me today that they had installed a new rear fan in the case which had three pin connecter so they used a MOLEX conversion lead and so maybe(somehow) either plugged it in reversed(yes it is possible.....just) or somehow manage to link the straight through connector to two 12v rails whilst taking the Power supply for the rear fan from the HDD power socket(it had a SATA> molex converter on it!!) I never saw the PC in it's "sorry" state since it left me working fine, only the HDD and it's burn out.

But it's now been replaced and working fine as before and the customer has let me install their new rear fan now so no problems now..... some people should stick to just using computers and not fixing them !!!!

Ps: they wanted their two PC's networked together last night, so I insisted on doing it through MSN's REMOTE Desktop Connection , so it got done correctly first time and not more phonecalls saying they had corrupted their OS this morning(I need a weekend off)lol

 

[Gigacore]

^ thats nice micro

 

[dOm1naTOr]

@sg1
wheres ur location dude?

 

[Gigacore]

^ West Sussex, South Coast of UK