Hard Drive Trouble - Read towards the end.

[patio]

Most SATA drives do not have jumpers.
I wouldn't recommend the Turbo setting in the BIOS.
Where was it set to run in IDE Mode ? ?

[stringo0]

Most SATA drives do not have jumpers.
I wouldn't recommend the Turbo setting in the BIOS.
Where was it set to run in IDE Mode ? ?

The IDE mode was set in BIOS - the options were SATA or IDE.

I tried to connect the drive to the regular SATA slots on the motherboard - but it wasn't recognized, so I plugged it back into the SATA II slot. The computer booted into Windows this time, and I'm using this time to backup data just in case - I called Seagate and they said I can send in the drive for a new one, so I'm planning on doing that once I'm sure.

Seagate suggested a zero clean - wiping the drive with zeros, fixing any bad sectors. What do you think of that?

I'm using about 250GB of the drive, which is hard to back up without losing something :|

[stringo0]

It seems to boot into windows, but Seatools cannot detect the drive :[

Do the backup programs you mentioned compess the data? (DriveImage XML and Acronis). I don't have anything that I can backup 250GB on. I do have a 60 GB External drive though - I can backup crucial files, but games, videos etc. can be reinstalled.

The windows CHKDSK came on this time, and said the following many times for different segments:
Deleting corrupt attrobute record (128, "")
from file record segment 402349
.
.
Deleting corrupt file record segment 80474.

File record segment 393028 is unreadable.
(Said the above for segments 393028-393035)

Deleting orphan file record segment 200.
.
.

Verifying indexes (Stage 2 of 3)
Deleting an index entry from index $0 of file 25. (Will post rest in the next post, it's currently running).

[stringo0]

After the CHKDSK Procedure, I seem to be able to boot Windows fine.

However, The Seatools boot disc cannot recognize the drive. Seatools Windows can't seem to recognize the drive either.

Any suggestions?

I'm going to see if I face any other problems, or else I'll keep using the pc as is after backing up data - any more guidance on the backup tools would be great.

Update:
BIOS seems to recognize the Hard Disk, but tools from the Ultimate Boot Disc don't seem to recognize any drives connected.

This seems weird to me as the pc continues to load into windows :[

Seagate Tech Support said the drive is probably bad, but can you give an explanation as to why windows seems to be booting fine, I can access data and install things but the dos tools can't detect the drive :[ ?

I don't want to be annoying/arrogant - it's just that I want to avoid having to backup and restore 250GB of data if i can.

[stringo0]

Additionally, Right after the install I was unable to install the Windows updates. Only one update was found, Windows Update 3.1, which fails every time, and it keeps trying to install it.

I manually downloaded the file(KB893803v2), but it doesn't install with this error:
Access is denied.

(Then it undoes changes, and restarts the computer)

[stringo0]

Latest update: Windows is loading fine, I'm able to play games for hours with no problems.

But - no hard drive tool detects the hard drive properly. It simply shows up as ST350063 0AS SCSI Disk Device

Seems to be working fine :[

Any idea what could be causing this? Maybe some weird access feature on the hd is broken?