I recently bought a 9GB Seagate SCSI hard drive (as a second drive in my system) which I discover will mount only if it is off for 30 minutes or more after system shut down. I called Seagate but they couldn't help. Defective drive or missing a needed option to be set by jumper or what?

I'm hoping one of the wonks here at FreeRepublic can direct me to a solution. Details of problem on request.

More than likely a defective drive - if it needs to 'rest' for a length of time, it's probably heat related - you can try to get some air moving around the drives to cool 'em down a bit. If the drive is under warranty, get it replaced.

Yeah, I kinda thought the same thing. But the idea that there might be some esoteric glitch in the drive design led me to ask.....

Thanks for your reply.

Out for the night. Will check back in the am, although Iowa sounds like (s)he's got it figured......

It probably is a bad drive, but one other thing to check for is the "drive start up" jumper... SCSI drives are designed to be used in bigger systems, and one of the jumpers on SCSI drives will keep the drive from spinning up until a signal is sent from the SCSI HBA.

That way, you don't have 12 drives all trying to spin up at the same time, killing the power supply.

But I'd have to agree that it's probably a heat related problem, and you'll probably need to replace it.

Mark

It does sound defective. However, you might want to check a few other things:

1. If the drive is hot to the touch right after you turn the machine off, it is not getting enough air. Move it somewhere else in the system, or buy one of those little fans that fit in the drive bay - they do work
2. There are some weird settings in both the SCSI BIOS and the drive that might affect it. Check the data rate, whether it is asynchronous or synchoronous data transfer, etc. in the BIOS (if you have an Adaptec SCSI you press Ctrl-A when the machine is booting).
3. On the drive side, check that TERMPWR is at the default setting, and the jumper setting for the drive starting to spin up is set to start the drive whenever it receives power from the power supply - drives can be set to only start spinning up when they receive a certain SCSI command.

Hope this helps.

The drive may be thermally protected. Search the model number at seagate and look at the specs.

Sounds like the bearing in the hard drive is heating up, thus causing it to crap out. Letting it "rest" allows the bearing to cool and so it will run again, for a while. My advice is to back up the drive next time its rested and then get a new drive.

It's the thermal protection on the hard drive. I could be a many things that could cause it to heat up. If you have data you want on that drive get it off now. I had a drive with the same problem. I had to put a cold gel pack on it so I could get the data off.

You can probablly take a hammer to it. Should take care of the overheating issue.

Sounds like a bad drive. Sorry...

Add me to the list of those diagnosing overheating. I had a second hard drive installed in a high-end IBM. I also had a new vido card installed. A week later the system crashed. I called the installation people and the tech revived the system and watched the 'innards' for about 15 minutes - after which time he used some little instrument and said it was too hot. He installed a fan and it worked fine.

Can someone help with my hard drive problem? The darn thing won't run unless I let it "rest"!

Viagra helps.

For future reference, you might try PC Guide for PC questions...there are some real experts here.

Go to Seagate's web site to find out jumper settings for their disk drives.

Seagate Drive Info

Thanks to each of you for your help.

I had gone to the Seagate website and downloaded manuals and set all the jumpers according to specs. I tried a 12 sec delay in starting and then tried making the new drive the startup drive. I even reformatted the drive and zeroed it on the off chance a bad sector was the culprit. Start up when cold was no problem. It's only when I turn off the computer and turn it back on again (even waiting 4 or 5 minutes) that the new drive runs up to speed and I can hear the stepping as it initializes, but the computer cannot "see" the drive as valid. The computer reads the id, but shows it as not having valid sectors. If I turn everything off and wait 30 minutes, everything works as it should.

The drive hasn't been installed in the computer case but just hooked up with a free flow of air all around it. With the consensus you all have expressed that the problem is a defective drive, I am in the process of boxing it up now for return. Thank you all again for giving me peace of mind about this and not a small amount of new info to add to my hard drive database of problems.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!!