Not a PowerPC or Even a Mac Question, But...

[Gamer9430]

Alright, this isn't a PowerPC or Mac related question in a sense, but as some of you may know, I recently got my Dell Latitude Laptop to use instead of my iBook in school. Through two acts of kindness, I received two very similar hard drives from two different people. The first one, which I got a week before the second one, has my windows 7 Pro install. I was having some issues with it, so I did a POST diagnostics Test and it said that it was failing the short DST test. So shortly after, I got the second hard drive. The first thing I did before anything else was test the DST, and this one failed as well, both with the same error code. I stuck both in my HP desktop and both failed on there as well. Now for my question, is there something that is wrong with my laptop that caused both hard drives to fail? According to both people who sent them, they worked fine prior to sending them. Also, would there be any way to fix them now that they both are failing DST tests?

Both hard drives are 320GB Seagate HDDs, both are from 2010 MacBook Pros, the only notable differences are that one has a higher revision number (.5 vs .6) and one has an Apple Logo.

 

[BrettApple]

They could have both "worked fine" and been failing. The only way to know would have been if the previous owner tested them with something like SeaTools or checked it's SMART stats.

I highly doubt your laptop killed them
Plus they are 5 year old 2.5" drives, the least reliable type. Did it say what was failing with them? Bad sectors? Because sometimes you can get away with a few and have the drive mark them as bad to just skip over them. Once you get to a certain point though, it's pretty unusable. Either way, it's failing though.

I would recommend investing in a small SSD though if you aren't going to use much space on it. You can find 120GB drives for less than $60 these days.

 

[Gamer9430]

They could have both "worked fine" and been failing. The only way to know would have been if the previous owner tested them with something like SeaTools or checked it's SMART stats.

I highly doubt your laptop killed them
Plus they are 5 year old 2.5" drives, the least reliable type. Did it say what was failing with them? Bad sectors? Because sometimes you can get away with a few and have the drive mark them as bad to just skip over them. Once you get to a certain point though, it's pretty unusable. Either way, it's failing though.

I would recommend investing in a small SSD though if you aren't going to use much space on it. You can find 120GB drives for less than $60 these days.

Yeah, that's probably what I'm going to do, get a SSD. And no, I can't find anything as to what the code means. I think I may use SeaTools on them and figure out what's wrong. Thanks for the assistance.