please help! hard drive failure

Does the computer that had this drive in it boot up at all with the drive in it? I mean like POST and gt as far as identifying the drives?

You could hook the drive up as slave to any other HDD in your system. If in doing so the computer refuses to boot then remove the drive and try booting again. If it works I would say the drive is dead. If it boots with the "dead" drive in it, is it accessable as a slave drive? If so you may just need to repartition and reformat the drive. If not then you probably do have a bad drive.

That is also a good Idea Rockn!

Post some system specs for us including the HDD manufacturer and model. PC info and OS info please.

HMMMMMMM WD strikes again? It is possible that the drive is bad. If you RMA'd the first drive, the way that most manufacturers handle RMA's is to send you a refurb drive not a new one. In most cases they work just fine. Occasionally they really suck and die almosst quicker than you can blink. Have you run the WD disk diagnostics on it yet?

The reason for hooking it up as slave is just to determine if the drive is accessable. It doesnt really matter though. And the disk diagnostics should let you create a botable floppy to run the diagnostics from. But it sounds like the drive is having problems. so you are going to have to run the Diagnostics anyway so that you can give WD the RMA code.

You may not meet with success if you are going to try using segate software with a WD drive. From the last time I used the Seagate software it is a pretty good program though. It has been a couple years, so hopefully it has only improved.

Here is the website for the WD Diagnostic utilities. http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp#diagutils It is free

do you have the software on a floppy? You should be able to boot from either the floppy or maybe the cd so that you can set up your Seagate disk before installing the OS. This is what I would do.