Re: OT: Damaged harddisk and/or disk controller - ps
On Thu, 20 Oct 2005 00:44:06 +0200
Kjetil Kjernsmo <kjetil@kjernsmo.net> wrote:
>
> > - do not mix ata-66 with ata-100
> > - do not mix ata-100 with ata-133
>
> Hmmm, OK. Is it that fragile...?
>
> The slave is a 4.5 GB Western Digital something someone threw after
> me... I dump things that are semi-important onto that for redundancy.
Using the WD in combination with a newer drive could be an issue and
even if it is the only drive on the cable it could have issues if it
is ran on an 80 wire cable.
For many people money is an object and they don't want to upgrade a
drive if they don't have to and so attempts are made to find solutions
that work.
Sometimes two drives just don't like each other.
Sometimes a 40 wire cable has to be used because the people in question
want to keep an older drive. Usually the preference is to put the older
drive in combination with the CD-Rom drive, but some newer drives don't
like running from a 40 wire cable.
I have one system with a Gigabyte motherboard that has some odd
behaviour, I never got it sent back within the warranty period and it
has been working the same for about 2.5 years. If I start it up and let
it boot normally the machine locks up within 5 minutes almost every
time. If I boot to a floppy, pause the boot, whatever... and let it run
for 30 seconds or so and reboot, it runs fine with no further issues
until it has been shut off for a while.
I don't do anything with the computer in question that make it's issues
significant and it does occasionally fail to see the drive at boot
time, usually it's few and far between.
The Maxtor drives I have had available to me for my personal use a 15, a
20, and a 40, all 3 drives have given me seek complete errors that show
in the log files that occur during the boot process on different
computers, but outside of that seem to work with no real problems.
Maxtor provides a utility to check their hard drives, which should
catch most issues. You can download the utility from the Maxtor
website, or if you prefer it is also included on the Utimate Boot CD
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ which is not a bad CD to have around.
If it is the drive that has the problem then from what you have
desribed it may not be an issue that the test utility is able to pick
up, so it may take some trial and error to figure out the real problem.
Using the Maxtor without it being paired to another drive is an easy
test to do before getting into the things others have suggested that
require additional parts or test equiptment.
Later, Seeker
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