Bad hard-drive

**UncasMS** · 21 Jun 2002, 04:30 AM

for configurating and torubleshooting i have had a secondary device as boot drive in one of my machines as well and i have had no problems at all using this pc for days.

concerning the cloning business: what was so painful with this?

i'm using powerquest drive-image (as well as partition magic) for years now; they never failed on me and it has always been a matter of minutes only!

**Batman** · 21 Jun 2002, 08:46 AM

Would you guys have an idea as to how long a typical (30 GB Western Digital) hard drive lasts?

**UncasMS** · 21 Jun 2002, 09:13 AM

nope

al i can say is:
i even had a 60gb diamond max replaced after 3MONTH *g*
another 40gb after some 7 month

a second 40gb, a 30gb + a very old 16gb drive work for years now

some ata100 controller and certain hdd modells are said to cause problems when NOT set to cable select but i'm not sure what killed my drives

**Enchanter** · 21 Jun 2002, 11:17 AM

I know of one friend whose system boots right from the secondary master drive, and it has been like that ever since she bought it (3 years ago). I'm not comfortable with having my system boot from the secondary channel as well, but it seems that there is nothing wrong with this setup (unless the motherboard you are using has issues related to it).

Harddrives have different and unpredictable lifespan. In one thread, I said that I had a 60 GB Quantum Fireball AS drive fail on me merely 3 months after I bought it. Tragically, my Quantum Fireball Lct (1 year older, now nearly 2 years old) outlasted it and is still working perfectly to store all my VOB files. I have various older drives as well (Seagate Medalist 17GB and WD 6.4GB) and they're still working, though not in use currently.

**admin** · 21 Jun 2002, 01:08 PM

Thanks for the replies. I guess I'll keep the secondary master boot drive for now.

As for the cloning process, it was painful because it took quiet a long time. I used PowerQuest Drive Image as well, but the 30 GB of data that had to be cloned, as well as the fact that I selected the "verify disk" option (which tripled the time it ordinarily takes to clone the disk, at about 150 MB/minute) - all in all, it took about 4 hours to finish the cloning.

And for hard-drive horror stories, I have one.

This happened several years ago with my Western Digital drive, which one day decided to fail - at first, it was just a few bad sectors, which were easily repaired/marked. Later, more bad sectors appeared (this should have been a warning for me, but I was too stupid to know anything back then), which I fixed again. I started to panic a little, so put some of my data onto 100 MB ZIP disks - unfortunately, just as I was about to finish copying, the system froze and I restarted my computer. Unfortunately, my entire C drive was gone - not actually gone, but everything had somehow merged into one big 600 MB file.

So I was left with no choice but to get a new Seagate HDD. I bought the HDD first and installed it myself - copying over all the data I had remaining on ZIP disks, I foolishly deleted all the stuff on the ZIP disks (since I needed them for something else).

Since the upgrade went "so smoothly", I decided to upgrade my CPU and motherboard as well, since the new drive supported a faster transfer method which my current motherboard doesn't support.

I decided to let the computer store upgrade my CPU and motherboard (which became a nightmare in itself - see my "Upgrading Nightmare" thread), and somehow, the computer store managed to kill my new HDD with all my data on it. Once again, I've become a computer virgin

Moral of the story : Backup, backup, backup before you do anything with your hard-drive.

P.S : My old WD HDD is still working fine in one of my old systems - it has 1000's of bad sectors towards the end of the drive (which I no longer use), but the start of it is still good. The computer store replaced the Seagate drive with another Seagate drive, which has worked well ever since.

**Batman** · 22 Jun 2002, 04:08 AM

Hi guys, recently as Enchanter would know I've been recieving ugly white errors (full details in "computer problems")

So I have to manually reboot, I get an error at about 30% (when Win 98 automatically does scan disk) that I have some long filename of sorts (which scandisk could not fix)---does that indicate my hdd is damaged perhaps? I can't figure out what long folder or filename I would have.

I'm not too fon of Western digital, it was just the cheapest available. Before this my Western Digital failed, it worked for 4-6 years, so not that bad I guess.

I've backed up my important assignments, the rest is movies, which I'm too lazy to back up. Takes about 30 mins for one cd.

**Enchanter** · 22 Jun 2002, 10:58 AM

It is difficult to determine whether the drive is going 'bye-bye' without doing a reformat, followed by observation on the drive whether the same errors would occur (If it does, the drive is indeed on its way out). However, it could also be a software error in there that Windows just can't fix (Reformat is truly curative). Have you tried doing manual scandisk (from within Windows) and set he configurations from there?

p.s. Western Digital was not too popular with their drives years ago. However, it is a different story now, with some of their recent drives rivalling those from the major HD manufacturers. I'm using a WD30 BB for my primary harddrive and it works like a charm.

**Batman** · 22 Jun 2002, 11:06 AM

This 30 gb WD hd is fairly new I brought it after my 3.5 gb wd drive failed (ironic but true). Its new so it shouldn't have any problems, but yeah I will do a scandisk from within Windows and I'll let you know. Maybe a reformat is in order.

**admin** · 22 Jun 2002, 12:57 PM

When you do a scandisk in Windows (95/98/Me), make sure you go into the "Advanced" section and select the right options (eg. there is one there to check invalid file names).

I am not sure if Western Digital has such an utility, but IBM has one for IBM drives that scans for errors - this it the utility I used to mark the bad sectors, when scandisk (both Windows and DOS) and even Norton Disk Doctor refused to do so (the hard disk makes a noise like it found a bad sector, but scandisk/NDD just skips over without marking it as bad).

**Enchanter** · 22 Jun 2002, 01:04 PM

For Batman

Actually, I was wondering if your WD HD might be overheating, as you were telling me that your hardware was experiencing such. HDs don't take overheating well and I know most HDs nowadays (esp. the 7200-rpm ones) produce enough heat to easily fry (OK, hurt) your hands should you put one on the surface. Make sure that the HD has enough access to cooling air. Tie back the IDE cables so as to improve airflow inside the case (Make sure you don't cause interference with the IDE data flow in doing so -> Difficult to explain here, but if you're having a related problem, I'll explain it nevertheless).

**Batman** · 22 Jun 2002, 01:31 PM

Temperatures have been hot (about 22C-29C). Its a 5400 rpm (to avoid heating issues). Thanks admin, for your advice--I never knew that. I'll to the scandisk that way. I'll update you all on my progress

**kevin abq** · 11 Jul 2002, 07:34 AM

Hard disks

I'm kind of the computer "guru" here at work and I've been getting a lot of feedback from coworkers on their equipment experiences since about '84 or so. Here's what I've learned about hard drive companies and products (desktop HDs as opposed to big server drives):
Seagate used to dominate the field until Western Digital came along. Then they dominated the desktop market. Conner, Seagate and Micropolis dominated the server market. All of a sudden, around 1989, the competition heated up rapidly. Companies started rushing products to market because the race was on to see who could sell the largest drive the fastest. At this point, Maxtor wasn't a major player yet. IBM was mainly on the server side.

This is the point when the technology started to almost move too fast. From 1993 or so until the present, the capacities have been ramping up at a staggering rate. Product develpment cycle times have been shortened more and more in this mad dash. High-volume players like Maxtor, Seagate, Quantum, WD and IBM ramped up their capacities. Companies like Micropolis and Conner fell by the wayside, defeated and unable to compete.

Western Digital's first major blunder came with the release of the 1.6 GB IDE drive. This was the first one to market with Mode 4 PIO transfer, at a staggering 16.6 MB/s burst speed. The problem was that they did not do "D-testing", or destructive testing ..also called life testing. They ended up with a whole bunch of drives that developed the "tick-tock" syndrome ... the head wandered aimlessly across the disk trying to find the target sector. It made a tick'tock sound. I had one that failed, as did three other people on my floor of the building. The sound meant you had about 2 more power-on hours before the drive would catastrophically fail. Until it did that, you could power-down and at least get some data off first. At around the same time, Maxtor cut some corners on their vacuum deposition processes. They make a mirror-smooth platter, then deposit the magnetic material on this surface in a vacuum. They made some unwise choices to try to please the shareholders, and they produced many drives that have a tendency to develop sector read errors with time. Again, it's a matter of development life testing and cost-cutting.

Maxtor felt it had to do this in order to compete with WD. The two companies dominate the "budget" end of the market. In the meantime, from the late '90s to present, IBM starts to see the fruits of dumping tons of money into HD technology. They lead all other vendors in areal density and reliability. They also were the first (along with Seagate and Quantum) to achieve 7200 RPM IDE drives. Quantum eventually bows out of the race, but IBM and Seagate are now the "quality" drives, while Maxtor and WD hold down the "budget" end of the market. There are other players, like Toshiba, Hitachi and Fujitsu, but here in the states, at least, they're primarily notebook and OEM HD vendors.

I don't know how WD stacks up now quality-wise, but whenever someone asks me for advice on hard disks, I advise they avoid WD and Maxtor like they were STDs! Just to be safe. And nowadays, with all drives being so inexpensive, paying an extra $20 or $30 for an IBM seems like cheap data insurance. To put it in perspective, my first HD purchase was in 1984 when I paid $750 for a 20 MB hard-card for my IBM PC, so I could boot without a floppy! Now you can buy an 80 GB HD for $79!

Sorry this post is so long, but I felt I needed to share my accumulated knowledge of PC hard drives.

Every once in a while, a company pulls a real bone-head move to save a few bucks on the bottom line. Case in point: Gateway 486 and early Pentium PCs (the ones that used the Micronics MB). Gateway decided that if they use a passive heat sink on the processor instead of a fan-forced-air heat sink, they can save $3.49 (or whatever) per PC. Multiply this by 5 million PCs per year, you have some serious money. The bad thing is that several PCs went through meltdown and simply failed from the CPU heat. A $5 fan would have saved the $500 CPU! My point is that WD and Maxtor are companies that repeatedly "push the envelope" in cost-cutting. Anecdotal evidence that they make a good drive "because I've never had trouble with it" means that you might be at the hairy edge of failure, but just haven't crossed it yet. It's best to avoid products from companies that are willing to compromise quality for marketing speed. For what it's worth, guys!!

**Enchanter** · 11 Jul 2002, 11:35 AM

Thanks for your input, kevin abq. When I was looking for a HD almost a year ago, I was set on an IBM drive(their 60GXP family, or something that sounds like that). However, I was unable to find anyone selling it in my area and I ended up with a 30GB 7200-rpm WD drive. It's not a bad drive either and I have no complaints on it. I bought it based on a review done by Storage Review.

Just a thought here. Do you notice that the consumer-level desktop harddrives seem to have been stuck at the 120 GB (With 160GB starting to trickle in already)? It's funny considering how fast the storage capacity was growing just the year(s) before.

**techno** · 20 Jul 2002, 07:37 PM

WD HDD's RULE! They kick a$$

My system:

Primary Master = WD 60GB 5400RPM
Primary slave = DVDROM
Secondary master = WD 40GB 5400RPM
Secondary Slave = CD-RW

My system has 4 OS's on them..all running perfectly.

When transferring data...it does it soooo fast, with UDMA mode set to 5 in the BIOS and PIO mode set to 5 also.

I took this 3.99GB video I captured (the 1 file) and transferred in 1 minute! aaaaaaaa!! I nearly had tears in my eyes lol

I had bad luck with Maxtor (honestly...8 hdd's replaced! in 2 years) and also seagate

WD are the way to go and is what I sell to my customers all the time with their systems/induvidual components.

In any way....if u have 2 hdd's, make sure u install an OS on each of them because:

incase of disaster or something, u can transfer files over in between them.
You can access files which need a Win32 Bit environment on any hdd cause u have an OS on it.

I had a 4th replacement of Maxtor hdd and the next day I switched it on, the motherboard could not detect that hdd at all.

lucky I had the other WD hdd (that was a 10GB) and I connected it, configured 98SE and switched it off, connected the maxtor hdd and both switched on, disabled the maxtor hdd in the BIOS, boot from the WD hdd into 98SE. It did have trouble with the maxtor hdd but once I told it to "Cool down" it kinda behaved itself and I just transferred the file in MS-DOS 16bit mode in 98SE. All data backed up (and I was in stress cause I had my High school final exams the next day!!!)

So, go for WD hdd's, u will never ever have a problem with it, if u do, it will warn u in time to backup your data.

This is just my 2 cents.

Bad hard-drive

Bad hard-drive

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment