Hi! My Hard Drive started to play up and I formatted and then ran a Samsung Diagnostic Test on it ESTOOL.EXE 2.11 and it came up with Service Code: AJ29: RAM ERROR Anyone knows what that means? It recommended I ERASE HDD and try the test again I tried to erase the HDD and it said ERROR: SECTOR ERROR. in red. I have tested the RAM using memtest+ 2.01 and I have let it run overnight and it showed no errors, so it definately wasn't my RAM. I am guessing this means that the 32mb Cache on the Hard Drive is faulty? any ideas This is the second hard drive that had died on me in the last couple of months, and both hard drives were SAMSUNG. Crap make.. In all my computing career, a hard drive has never died on me and now the 2 out of 3 samsung drives I have die with in a month apart. The HD501LJ died after 10 months of use and I have had it RMA'd through ebuyer and they were very good about it and I have had it back within a few days. I have tried to RMA the HD753LJ through ebuyer after 2 months of purchase date and they said that because it is after 28 days of purchase I now have to do it through SAMSUNG directly. I have raised a technical query through their site and I am waiting a response from them. Plus, all my samsung hard drives don't run in SATAII with my motherboard nor do they run in ACHI.. which is a bummer.
Everyone gets a bad hard drive now and then. RAM error will mean the internal cache has gone bad - it should be a simple exchange with Samsung, although I've never RMA'd a Samsung drive before. Heard from who exactly? Seagate, Maxtor and Western Digital takes about a week or two.
In regards to the HD753LJ I have since sent the Hard Drive back to their warranty return service through Rexo UK Ltd. They replaced the Hard Drive and have isssued me with another one (it looks new). I run the same test using Samsung's Diagnostic Tool and I got the same error AJ29. I tried patching it down to 1.5Gb/s using their software but it won't register the downgrade and still shows as 3Gb/s. It recommended that I ERASE HDD using their ESTOOL software and it came up with ERROR: SECTOR ERROR I ran the test again and a whole load of errors AJ26 AJ27 AJ29 Bad Sector S.M.A.R.T. eRROR rAM eRROR I phoned them up and they issued me another replacement (3rd Hard Drive) Tested it using their software and it came up with AJ29 RAM error. I am starting to think that this may be a compatibility issue with my motherboard SATA Controller I have a Asus P5K-Premium AP/WiFi Black Pearl Edition BIOS 0702 Rev 2 00 G There are 3 SATA controllers on the board. 2 Internal INTEL 1 External JMICRON I ran the test with the 2 different internal ones ERROR I ran the test on the external one and it PASSED. Any ideas?
Bios 0702 hasn't been officially released by Asus as far as I'm aware so you might wanna be careful with that. I have the same motherboard, running the 0612 Bios with zero problems. Having said that, I'm sure lots of people were having trouble with the P5K Premium & Samsung Spinpoints early on (in RAID mode mostly IIC) and I think they found that the fault was with the intel SATA contoller. Spinpoints are great drives though, I own a couple and they've always been fine. Good Luck
According to Asus's site 0702 was released 29th July 2008 I have low-level formatted the hard drive through the JMICRON controller and re ran the test and it came up with AJ26 ERROR S.M.A.R.T. error I tried testing it on another machine and the test also came up with the same error. I contacted Rexo (Samsung's Warranty provider) and they said yes the drive is faulty and they have arranged collection tomorrow. That's 3 drives. Now it is either my motherboard is ruining these drives OR.. I am just unlucky and seem to get faulty drives. I think it is the former. When I get the replacement, I'll just sell it on ebay and get a seagate instead.
http://support.asus.com/download/download.aspx?SLanguage=en-us&model=P5K Premium/WiFi-AP Doesn't seem to list the 0702. I can find it in several other sites but I'd rather grab a bios file from "the horses mouth" than a random location. If you think it's the motherboard at fault, why would swapping it for a Seagate make any difference?
Hi WhiskeyAlpha I followed the link that you supplied and it took me to the support Asus site as mentioned for the P5K Premium/WiFi-AP as expected. The first BIOS (being the latest) was listed as below I am awaiting delivery of the 4th Samsung Hard Drive through their RMA procedure. I have spoken to Samsung Technical support directly and they think that it may be a faulty SATA2 Controller on the motherboard. I'll contact Asus technical support on their site and see what they say.
Its been a while since I have visited you guys. I'm glad to be back. Well, to carry on from the post that I had posted a few months ago. I have received back my 4th Hard Drive from Samsung and have decided to install it directly into another machine A Dell Vostro 200. The hard drive worked fine up until today where it started to make a very serious clicking noise and now I can't access any of the data on there. I'm so dissappointed in Samsung as a make that I just don't trust them. I had a Samsung Laptop that the screen died after 2 years of use. I'm going to try the freezer trick to try and retrieve the data off the hard drive before I RMA the hard drive. AGAIN!!!!
Event viewer has boatload of "device X has a bad block" errors? Welcome to the club. One of my T166s started doing the same thing today. Happened at a very inconvenient time as I already spent enough money at the dentist yesterday and today morning splurged for an Eee PC. Slight OT: Why has the general HDD quality gone down the drain during last few years? I've given up on Maxtor/Seagate as their drives just love to develop bad sectors.
