Bad SATA cable?

[CSULB71]

Can a bad SATA cable cause a HDD S.M.A.R.T. error? I bought a used Maxtor SATA hard drive that I successfully installed and formatted as a second HDD.

I ran the HDD diagnostic utility from Seagate/Maxtor called "SeaTools", and got the following message at the start of the test: "Pretest Failure WARNING -- A SMART trip was detected prior to the test starting. Do you want to continue?" Supposedly, a "SMART trip" means the drive is faulty in some way. I ran the "long test" anyway and it passed, but I don't want to use the drive as my new primary boot drive as I had intended until I can sort this out. Thanks.

[budz]

I've never heard of a bad SATA cable causing a hard drive failure. Try using a brand new SATA cable then rerun the hard drive tests with the Seagate tools. IMHO I think you just bought a used hard drive that was failing to begin with. I wouldn't buy a used hard drive unless I knew it was in good working condition. Just my 2 cents!

[CSULB71]

It is a new SATA cable, but you never know...
The HDD was claimed to be "new, never used, pulled from an Apple G4". I tend to agree with you about not buying a used HDD, but I figured it was worth a shot.

[videobread]

I had a bad cable and thought it was the hard drive.

https://forum.videohelp.com/topic336694.html

[CSULB71]

videobread -- after reading redwudz's comment in your thread, it still makes me suspicious of the SATA cable, as it was supplied with the mobo. I'll try to locate a better cable to see if there's any difference.

[videobread]

Search ebay for a:

12'' Serial ATA SATA Hard Drive Data Cable Right Angle

[budz]

Here's a 10 inch w/right angle with free shipping.

http://www.svc.com/gc10akm12.html

If you need a longer length svc.com has 18, 24 & 36 inches available w/free shipping as well. I buy most of my cabling needs for computers from them.

[Nelson37]

Cable is so cheap and easy to change it would be downright silly NOT to try a different one.

"New" does not necessarily mean "Known Good".

"Used" absolutely, positively does NOT mean "Known Good". Only way I buy pulls is if I know the guy that pulled it.

Used HD hardly ever worth the risk.

[redwudz]

If it passes the manufacturers diagnostics, I would probably ignore S.M.A.R.T. unless that same fault shows up again. JMO.

S.M.A.R.T. is not infallible. It can have false positives, especially with a drive that has been used for other purposes. If it was pulled, it was used. It at least was partitioned and formatted if it was in a computer. And if it was a boot drive, it may have had a OS on it, even if the computer was never turned on.

Did you repartition it before you formatted it? There may still be something on there. I do both with any used drive, and also don't use the 'quick' format option.

I probably wouldn't use it as a boot drive either, until I was sure it was operating properly.

And I would definitely try a different SATA cable, just in case....

[CSULB71]

Yes, I repartioned the 160GB HDD into 2 partitions using MaxBlast3 -- primary DOS active (C) @ 15GB, and logical extension (D) @ 135GB -- and then formatted it to FAT32 for Win 98SE use. I cloned my old drive onto it (C @ 10GB and D @ 20GB) using Acronis TruImage, and everything seemed to work fine. Windows reported the two drives with the correct capacity, but the D drive really had only 30GB! I found this out when I tried to move the paging/swap file of 512 MB to the D drive, and windows said I didn't have enough space available. I futzed around with it for a while longer, then gave up. I used FDISK to remove the partition, then FDISK reported the whole drive was only 15GB! I used SeaTools on the HDD again, and got the "SMART trip" error message again. The HDD is now on it's way back to the seller for a refund. After all this, I assume the SATA cable is good.