Hard disc prob

[tony draper]

Had me hard disc go tango uniform on me today, managed to get in using rescue disk, couldn't save my stuff so formated it.. .Format ran surface scan and marked six sectors as bad, also corrected prob with disk space being reported incorrectly.. . I loaded windows on the formated disc, but it kept hanging, got it installed eventualy but now it seems to be running very slowly.. .Various utilites don't seem to work such as the browse function in instal new hardware.. .I was wondering if I format the disk again will the bad sectors still be marked or will it run through the surface scan again.. .Its a 15 gig IBM deskstar, never had a pick of bother with it before.

[FL310]

TD, what aisleman says is, unfortunately, true...check your warranty, you mat get it replaced, but don't trust it anymore... <img border="0" title="" alt="[Roll Eyes]" src="rolleyes.gif" />

[shack]

I think they are right but before you throw it away try downloading the disk test program from the IBM site it might come up with something.

[tony draper]

Good news, formated again, this time the format ran at normal speed, reloaded windows again at normal speed and with no hangs,disk appears to be fine.. .Now only problem I have is geting the fecking modem to work,graphic card driver,sound card drivers loaded first time fine, windows doesn't seem to want to recognise the manufacturers drivers from the modem instalation disc.. .Thanks for the help, back to the grindstone.. .Six bad sectors out of 2000 odd don't seem that bad might get a couple more years out of disc.. .PS the mistake I made was runnins surface scan after I had loaded windows I think.

[Feeton Terrafirma]

I'm not specifically familiar with the IBM hard drives or the utilities available for it, but if they offer a tool to do a low level format, I'd try that before I totally scrap the drive. If the low level format is successful it should provide some sort of a report (just like used in the factory during manufacturing) to confirm the drive is now working correctly... or otherwise.. .. .good luck Mr Draper

[malanda]

I really wouldn't trust it. The problem is that once the surface starts breaking up, bits tend to cause damage elsewhere, so you get progessively more failures.. .. .As you've lost all your data anyway, save yourself loads more bother and buy a new disk now.

[Mac the Knife]

Urrr. Trust you ran FDISK on it before you reformatted it. If the Master Boot Record is corrupt then it'll always be wonky not matter how many times you format it (FORMAT does not affect the MBR).. .. .You could try the undocumented /MBR switch for FDISK which writes a new bog-standard MBR to the drive. Don't do this if you are using any special boot loaders to access your disk (stuff like Lilo or OnTrack). Or FDISK "Delete Partition" and then recreate one. But FDISK alone can't be trusted to truly zero out the MBR.. .. .(Untested)MBRTool is free from <a href="http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/" target="_blank">http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/</a> but is command line driven which can be a bit intimidating unless you are used to it. Use it to refresh the MBR (or nuke it totally and start again from FDISK [remember to set your boot partition to active or it'll never boot]).. .. .(Untested)Partit.exe from <a href="http://www.filelibrary.com/Contents/Multi-Platform/57/6.html" target="_blank">http://www.filelibrary.com/Contents/Multi-Platform/57/6.html</a> (download as Martitz.zip) can also totally nuke the MBR as well as other useful things.. .. .It's a good excuse to buy a new HDD, but a pint says the IBM is still OK (give all the connectors a good squirt of circuit cleaner).

[siwalker66]

Do any of you feel that erasing software which overwrites data many times (<a href="http://www.tolvanen.com/eraser/" target="_blank">(like eraser, available here)</a> . .decreases the life of the hard disc significantly? Seems likely.. .. .TD: hope you get it sorted out

[tony draper]

Yeh did fdisk it, seems to be fine, my other hard disk is older than this one same IBM deskstar model, now if it can just get the dammed modem to work I will be one happy puppy.

[Mac the Knife]

Interesting thought ch_66. .. .From what I can find the on the Web and thinking about it, probably not.. .. .MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure) for modern drives is often given as ridiculous figures (400,000 hours is 45 years!) and doesn't mean that. One source says that the useful life of any given drive is 5-7 years (45,000 to 60,000 power on hours). IBM quote the life of their new drives as being 20,000 to 30,000 power on hours.. .. .Unless it is on a network server a typical hard drive isn't doing anything much except spinning - I'd reckon that my drives are actually seeking and reading/writing only about 5% of the time that they are running. In the days when memory chips were expensive and memory sizes small the OS used the disk as "virtual memory" and kept them pretty busy (try having a couple of apps active under Win95 on a 16MB machine and you can hear the drive thrashing). Now that most users have a minimum of 64MB of memory and often much more there is far less need to "page" active memory out to disk and back again so that the actual drive head mechanism is less likely to be working. Also modern OSs/BIOSes and drives spin down after a period of inactivity and. .only wake up again when the OS wakes up.. .. .So I guess we have to consider the spindle motor and the drive-head mechanism almost separately and then try and factor in all of the above. Parhaps the faster 7200 rpm drives have more spindle failures (they certainly run hotter)?. .. .I'd hazard a guess that on an average day a single security overwrite of a 50MB file would only add a fraction of a % to the overall head mechanism activity for the day and nothing to the spindle run-time.. .. .[Must now get beer to cool off overheating brain circuitry]

[Tinstaafl]

Last Nov/Dec I had a 20Gb Fujitsu laptop HD fail. The first indication was excessive churning while it tried to read files, then files getting corrupted.. .. .Eventually the bad clusters were happening damn near as fast as scandisk could find them. Even running scandisk a number of times kept locating new bad clusters.. .. .Finally the disk's SMART monitoring popped up a failure warning.. .. .Luckily for me the drive was less than 12 months old. Only just - the warranty lapsed in Jan!. .. .One refund later & I bought an IBM 30Gb as a replacement. The best news is that the price had dropped significantly so I saved about 60 or 70 quid, gained and additional 10Gb AND I get a fresh 1 year warranty! <img border="0" title="" alt="[Cool]" src="cool.gif" /> . .. .Now if only I could get the damned inverter board on my laptop screen's flouro backlight to stop overheating & forcing a reboot to return a viewable image. <img border="0" title="" alt="[Frown]" src="frown.gif" />. . . . <small>[ 27 March 2002, 20:28: Message edited by: Tinstaafl ]</small>