Hard Drive Hell!! I need Ice Water!
The 300 gig sata Maxtor died, so I sent for RMA and paid $20 for advanced replacement 2 day air. Also at same time I ordered a 250gig sata Seagate from Newegg, free 3 day shipping. Ok today I got my drive from Newegg today, still waiting for the drive from Seagate though. Seagate sent a e-mail from DONOTREPLY that my drive was shipped, however the tracking number they sent me UPS knows nothing about, so what's up? Checked on Seagate site, it does not even list a traking number at all, just status of order wich is drive was shippidded and I ain't sent mine back yet, well I knew that!! Newegg is in california, much further than TX!!! Seagate was supposed to be 2day, newegg was 3day. I have the Newegg drive, but know nothing about seagates! Anyway, first thing I did with the new Seagate 250 sata was run spinrite on it. Drive checked out clean, no problems. Nice and quite also. So I write a signature to it with windows 2K and proceede to format it. Of course my 250gig drive is only showing as 233gigs not formated or partioned yet :( Well formatting is always slow, but I got to 89% in reasonable time. Seemed to be staying at 89% for a bit though. I went and ate, microwaved 4 burritos had a beer and such, course that all took a fair bit of time! Go back to computer and it's still at 89% :( What the heck? So I roll the mouse, no mouse! I hit control-Alt -delete, nothing! System is locked! Now I just worked on it 18 hrs doing animation last night and half today, this system does not lockup like that. All I was doing was formatting the new drive at this time, so what is up??? So after I rebooted I expect errors of course, I go to the hard drive manager stuff, windows says the new drive is healthy and ready to go??? YA sure!!! Power down a locked up system at 89% formated and I really beleave the drive is going to be perfect, healthy and reliable now??? Also a question, why the heck does disk manager cause a firewall message to pop up? I got a sata drive I need to format and PF2 warns me disk manager is trying to access a port on my computer and shows my network address?

Might just be polling the firewire port if you have one (firewire is considered a network connection and the firewall does protect it). Also many apps use a network loopback connection. As I told you in your email I would re-format the drive.

Like FP said, you should just reformat the drive. You should also be on top of Seagate. They promised 2 day shipping, you didn't get it, you should get your $20 back.

decline the charges with your creditcard.

I reformated the drive 2 more times and both compleated fine without locking up the system again. Now I'll run spinrite again to make sure there's not a bad spot or anything that caused the lockup first time I formatted. It's not the $20 so much, or the shipping time, it's mostly the bad tracking number and no contact info so I have to sit and wait for that replacement drive from Seagate. The $20 includes shipping cost to send my bad drive back also, plus I use their packaging, I won't have to go scrounging for 2" foam rubber like they require to be used. I figured it would cost me $10 or more to ship the bad one to them anyway. It's that I have some place to go but I have to be here at 4PM when UPS comes if the package has to be signed for like I read. So since they sent me a bad tracking number I don't know what day that even is, or even for sure that it was shipped! Should have been yesterday but wasn't! So Yesterday and today is shot now waiting, if it don't come today I guess sit and wait again tomorrow? When I go away about 6am I won't be home again till 9pm or later, it's an all day trip. Since I am the only one that can be home at 4pm I can't go till I get the drive :( I could have gone yesterday, then I would have had some new tools to play with while I sit and wait today. LOL

I'll be asking my bank about getting my $20 back after I tell Seagate I want it back! I called Seagate, they could not tell me anything said call UPS, I did and all UPS said was ya the tracking number doesn't show up. Tonight it does, shedualed for delivery on MONDAY!!! Some 2day air! I got the e-mail it was supposedly shipped on Tuesday! Seagate gal told me like 24-48 hours for proccesing plus the 2 day shipping, well that would be 4 days tota max! ! I placed the online order on Sunday, so they had 2 full working days and 2 shipping days already, Friday would be a 5th extra day! So Monday is a 6th day, plus the weekend is shot. This really put into perspective just how good NEWEGG really is! I got that order that was placed at the same time yesterday. The order I placed couple days later UPS tracking shows will arrive Friday. From now on I'll buy my own foam rubber and ship back the bad hard drive First and not pay for advanced replacement, it obviousily is not any faster!

That's an exception in my experience. Someone dropped the ball. I've always gotten fast turnarounds on advanced RMAs from all the major manufacturers. HOWEVER I've also never paid for an advance RMA, nor would I. With the exception of one video card manufacturer a few years ago, I've never had to pay for an advanced RMA.