HI,
i have two seagate hard drives.
ST380215AS
ST3500320AS (new Firmware flashed SD1A (validated one) )

So the thing is the hard-drives some times act fuzzy as far as booting is concerned. i have ubuntu on my other hard-drive

I have saved logs from HDDLife and CrystalDiskInfo
They give slightly different perspectives about it. But that only adds to my confusion

Also my 3500 has been recently replaced. i had bought it in november last year.
So is it safe to use these hard-drives.
Is it possible that there is some problem with the SATA cables instead of the hard disk. This is because i had installed Ubuntu and put a lot of stuff in it after 4-5 hrs and then the 3500 crashed. figured out it was a firmware issue but i'm not really sure, can somebody please tell me more about this ?

what did u mean when u are talking " and then the 3500 crashed".... not detected? some strange sound inside or what?

Ubuntu's files got corrupted. Not entirely crashed. BUt file errors on Ubuntu.
Infact Ubuntu froze while normal operation, and then upon reboot certain files appeared corripted. Some checks failed. I think it happened after i flashed SD15A but i dont know what is happening.
I inter-changed the SATA IDE cable and now both of them work. But i'm wondering how long :S

The best way , to u be safe should be u use a soft like MHDD; Victoria,etc and did a scan sector test, if tests sucess u will be so safe because , Media could be OK, SA too , and MHA too the " HDD engineering its working " , because its identified the engineering zone showing all information "Model, ID; LBA, Size , etc" and was able to did the complete surface and the hdd its answering to the "ATA command" , so could be FS problems on a logic level situation, and discard physical problems

Regards