It seems to be harddrive dying month...

[az]

Bearings sound fine - what's that stuff with the fridge? What is this supposed to do?

Maybe it was just windows REALLY fux0ring NTFS? On both partitions at once?

AZ

[Jon P. Inghram]

If the disk was siezed up, that might make the parts contract far enough to let it spin up. Also, it'll make the drive do some serious thermal recalibration, which could help (or make it even worse. )

[az]

Well, the drive sounds normal, apart from constantly moving the heads in a regular pattern, so I don't think anything is stuck to anything. The noise only starts after POST, so it's clearly nothing physical (which would make noises as soon as the drive powers up).

AZ

[Chrono_Wanderer]

Maxtor all the way baby! (At least for me)

[UtwigMU]

Do a search in arstechnica.com Other Hardware forum, or post there. Caos usually suggests this. There is also a Maxtor employee who frequents the forum.

There is also 25 or so pages long "The perpetual my IBM GXP 75 just died thread".

[GNEP]

Can we get that Maxtor employee to come over here as we move over to being the "Maxtor Users Resource Centre"?

[Kurt]

1/ try IBM's Drive fitness Test software

2/ your choice of Powerquest Lost & Found, Easy Recover Pro, Media tools, etc.

Some of these are really expensive mind you, but I'm sure someone has a registered copy that you can try and put your hands on...

[leech]

After having my own little harddrive fiasco over the past month... let me tell you that the fridge thing actually somewhat works.... the drive did die about a week later, but of course it was still under warranty so I got a replacement drive from Maxtor. By the way it's a Quantum (now maxtor) Atlas II 10k Ultra160 SCSI 73gb drive. Bastard gets hot too.

The other day I came home from work, and my system was booted into the linux login screen. I had left it running with WindowsXP, so naturally I had guessed that the power had just flickered and reset my PC. But I looked at my server, which is plugged into the very same outlet, and it had the uptime of 5 days. So then I tried to reboot into windows and all I got was a clunking noise.... Now I know that the harddrive was Ok, because while in linux I was listening to a few MP3's, which I had stored on the 73gb drive.

To clarify this a bit so as to try not to confuse anyone further. I have the 73gb drive along with a 80mb/s IBM 9.1 gb drive which has Debian Sid on it. But on the SCSI chain, the 73gb drive is ID 0 and the 9.1gb is ID 1. The lilo bootsector is on the 73gb, then of course it is told to boot from /dev/sdb1 for linux and /dev/sda1 for windows. So why was I getting a clunking noise as soon as I selected windows considering the lilo boot sector was in the MBR of the 73gb drive? (still this will forever remain a mystery.) So in my paranoia that yet another drive bit the dust, I ran the verify sector in the SCSI controller's BIOS. Well, while it was at 92% with no errors, I had to take a bathroom break. When I came back I got that dreaded "Unexpected Timeout Error" I paniced, almost crapped, cursed, and punched myself for not backing anything up.......then it occured to me that indeed I had already been reading the damned drive though linux, and that quite possibly the part where it was clunking, was where the verify timed out. So I pulled out my WinXP CD, went into the recovery console and did the "FIXBOOT" "FIXMBR" things and viola! Windows now boots. It ran chkdsk (because of course it hadn't been properly shutdown) and detected no errors. So my only guess is whatever powersurge hit, somehow killed the windows boot sector, but didnt' actually affect the MBR. Which of course I now need to fix lilo so that I can go into linux. (Simple enough, you've got to love Debian's rescue disk built onto the installation CD (I wish more distributions had this method. Only a few of them do.))

Now my question is, why is lilo whining that the kernel and bios are reporting different cylinders/heads for the 73gb drive?

Leech

P.S. Sorry for the long post, thought I'd share my horror story of harddrives failing in the hopes that it could help others.

[Chrono_Wanderer]

A bit off topic... but this is what GNEP wishes

[GNEP]