Problems with maxtor HD (what a surprise)

[DentyCracker]

LuckyG could be right. Unfortunately I have a machine with a problem like that in one of the power connectors that comes staight from the power supply, took me a long while to realise that was the problem.

[RAB]

MadScot,
I hate to ask the obvious but have you tried a good old defrag from safe mode? This might help.

I've also got a Maxtor 10 gig drive (52049U2)and it has a similar problem with dropped frames. But it only appears to drop a few frame in less than a second - not ten seconds like yours. I think my problem is caused by a full drive. I have less than 100 megs of free disk space and my swap file memory is managed by Windows because of the low space problem.

Is you disk full or nearly so? If so free some space, defrag and set your swap file to a fixed size immediately after the defrag. If your swap file is on the other drive, this could also be the problem, but the same advise applies - defrag and fix your swap file on the SCSI disk.

RAB

[az]

hi

my gf has some problems with her hard drive as well (under win98), and yesterday when i switched her pc on and started ie, the system hang (or at least appeared so, might just be 100% cpu usage?), and the drive made rhythmical access noises until i shut the pc off - scandisc then wanted to to a surface scan and found bad sectors... could this be the result of a headcrash while carrying her hd? (i don't know if that happened, i just want to know...)

AZ

[xortam]

Yes, you may well have damaged the disk. The sound you heard was probably the drive retrying a read which kept failing. Let it mark the bad sectors and see if it can successfully access the disk.

[az]

the "big" scandisc (dos) test will mark them, won't it? we do have the llformat utility and i know it performs some rather long test to the drive before formatting.. should we run it? (we'll be reinstalling her sys anyways in a few weeks)

iirc, we ran into this problem once more since, but after that, it was gone... i'll sit and watch and if more sectors die we'll know she needs a new hd...

thanx

AZ

[xortam]

Either DOS or Windows ScanDisk will mark your bad sectors. You can do a more complete job of repairing the disk by booting up from DOS. See what ScanDisk can repair before attempting a low level format.

[az]

thanks, i'll try that

AZ

[MadScot]

RAB - My disk is half full (or is it half empty?) and is not fragmented. I tried moving my swap file on and off the drive, but no help.

All the other suggestions above will need to wait until after finals

MadScot

[thecurse]

get spinwrite by gibson research www.grc.com and give that a try

[MadScot]

Thanks for all the help. It turns out that the drive was defective. Maxtor RMAed it and I had a new drive in three days. While their quality control leaves something to be desired, their tech support was fast, friendly, and helpful. I guess they must be used to replacing drives. The new drive works perfectly (for now ).

MadScot

[DentyCracker]

I have a couple Maxtor 10 GB drives that have been running problem free since 1998 so don't knock 'em. Unlike many people here I've only had one fail on me since 1998 and to be honest, I damaged that one accidentally with a keyboard in early 1999, Maxtor repaired it and I have it still working fine in one of my machines

[cbman]

Damaged your HD with a keyboard... LOL... take one to many swings at your computer with it when you were pissed off?

Charles

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Canadian... Hell Ya!!!

[HollyBerri]

My word of support... I've had a 1GB, 2 7GBs and now 2 20GB Maxtor drives and have never had a drive failure-- my only data loss was due to the (%$*&@$%##) Norton Utilities destroying my DOS FAT table. I've created and deleted partitions, copied and moved full partitions and brought these babies to Holland in my carry-on luggage (!!!!) and still have all the data originally on the drive.

Just my 0,05 (we don't have pennies here ).

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Holly