It might still be worth applying any available firmware update for that drive, Seagate has had several issues and IIRC that time frame was right in the middle of them.

You're right, for any serious drive issues you can't diagnose from within Windows, the HAL gets in the way. So, like you did you have to boot something else.

>It's 15 months old, first HD failure I've had in ages (knocking wood quite soundly), the Seagate error article doesn't seem pertinent to my error.
>
>The BIOS config showed the drive and serial # ok. Evidently Windows was trying to read something off it that was "vital" to boot that it couldn't get. It seems like a fault tolerance thing missing from Windows to have not instead barfed up a messagebox saying "Having problems reading X off Drive E: you should get that fixed, I'm going ahead and booting up the rest of the machine in the meantime"
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>It was only after the attempt to boot from the Windows setup CD and it's status said it was accessing the second drive and never going past that point that I considered unplugging the SATA cable to the drive.
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>I'd downloaded and run a DOS based tool from Seagate that creates a bootable floppy disk (they had a CD ISO image version too but that was a lot more work), it "fixed" the 3 bad LBAs and it's the test I ran over night to see if any other errors existed.
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>The Seagate Windows utilities are kinda braindead... one, whose UI is really stupid, when run the test it just says "Failed"... no indication of what or how bad how to fix and no % done meter.. just "Failed"
>
>
>>Glad you found it! That reminds me of another general troubleshooting technique - to simplify, i.e. remove everything from the computer except those components that are absolutely necessary to boot it.
>>
>>Another thing to check is, when you plug in the 1TB drive, if it changes the device boot priorities in your mobo BIOS. ISTR seeing that happen on occasion. Maybe, with that drive installed the system is trying to boot from it?
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>>Most drive makers these days have downloadable diagnostics programs. Some of them can create bootable CDs.
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>>I've had my bacon saved a couple of times by SpinRite - well worth its price if you need its capabilities.
>>
>>If your 1TB drive is a fairly recent Seagate, you're probably aware Seagate had some initial firmware problems with some of those drives: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/seagate-firmware-7200.11-drives-bricking,6885.html