Failing drive?

[BOAC]

I'm having occasional trouble with a Drive. During initial boot, as the drive info is read, the disk I/D is sometimes read incorrectly, and in the past when this has happened I have finished up with a corrupt disk from which I could not boot and which had an 'unecognisable' format.

Since then, OS (W2000/XP dual boot) has been moved onto other drives, but can anyone tell me what could be causing this? Is it likely to be a bios problem/CMOS battery or just a drive needing to go out grass?

[rustle]

What's the drive make/model?

Sounds like the Maxtor "Athena" / 2B020H1 problem ;)

[BOAC]

I can only find Maxtor (coincidence??!!) 6Y080LO via Windows unless there is another way of getting disk info. I t shows 51536H2 in system props.

I get the disk info normally during boot (it is a primary slave) but when this thing happens the letters/numbers are partly replaced by ))))))

[Irish Steve]

Hmmmmm...... it looks horribly like the drive is getting slow on start up, so not spinning up to speed before the processor tries to access it, I would agree that a copy off and put it out to grass could indeed be called for, unless you've added new hardware recently, which could be asking a bit too much of the power supply, and it's this disc that's suffering from low voltage.

Not that likely though, as it's already been at the "master" drive and got the info from that.

You've tried removing and replacing the cables, power and data, to the drive, just in case it's a slightly dodgy connection?

OK, once it's running, it's probably going to behave itself for some time to come, but the risk is there, so your call :E , if it's got anything on it that's remotely important, it's not worth the risk

[BOAC]

Ta guys(?) I think the 'replace' option is winning here!

All the Maxtor tests come up fine, which fits with Steve's theory as the disk will be 'up-to-speed' by then although I had assumed that the data which comes up during boot was in ROM on the disk?

No matter, anyone want a Maxtor 14GB drive in perfect nick? £140 or offer :D :D

[rustle]

When a disk "boots" it gets its instructions from firstly the firmware (PC board on the drive) and secondly from the microcode stored on (inaccessible to you) sectors on the disk.

There are known faults in some drives which make either of those two unreadable, therefore making the disk unreadable by BIOS/software.

Copy off what you need, and do it NOW if it is showing failure symptoms -- disks are so cheap these days...

[BOAC]

Roger!

[windy1]

I don't have this problem and I hope I never do, but what options are there if - like my 2003 Samsung laptop, the XP Pro is already in a special partition on the hard drive and I do not have any OS on CD ?

[rustle]

windy1 - get yourself a copy of Norton Ghost or similar (I know there are other products sometimes discussed on this forum)

From there you can clone the drive - including the "hidden" manufacturer's restore partition - either onto another hard disk which is ready to go should your's fail(1), or into an image file you can store on DVD(2).

Ghost supports USB connected devices, so even from a laptop (where there's usually only one hard drive slot) you can clone direct to another hard disk using a USB caddy...

In case 1, where you've cloned the hard disk onto another hard disk just plug in and away you go.

In case 2 (image file) you can boot-up from the Ghost (program) CD and then re-copy the image (on the DVD) onto new hardware.

It is easier than it sounds ;)