My hard drive’s about to fail, any advice?

[Placebo 29]

but refuses to boot as a master for some reason so I have to use it purely as a storage drive.

You have the right connection set on the IDE/SATA-connector. Sometimes you dont have the little pin for slave, sometimes you have to put it master manually, but often it's Cable Select. Check it out, that may be the problem.

Yeah I had everything set right, just windows would not boot when installed to that drive no matter what, one time it even corrupted the windows installation between attempts to boot into windows, in the end I decided it was safer to use solely for storage

[Artak 0]

Quote[/b] ]I'm also one of the band of former-Maxtor customers, I bought a new drive, it died, I RMA'd it, it was replaced with a refurbished drive not a new drive which I was not happy about, the replacement drive also died, it was again replaced, again with a refurbished drive, the 2nd replacement works ok but refuses to boot as a master for some reason so I have to use it purely as a storage drive.

That's making sure customer satisfaction for you.

I've had to use the Maxtor RMA method and boy does it suck. Nowadays I'd rather get any drive with 1 year warranty compared to a similar maxtor with say 3 year warranty, it's that bad. Even if you manage, being a foreigner, to fill out the forms and get PowerMax and use and fill out the forms again, and pack and sent the drive so that Maxtor accepts it, you'll still end up with a used halfarsed drive, which cost you in worst case an enormous amount of trouble + shipping.

Incidentally I have a 60GB maxtor that won't boot up as a master drive in one of my computers, but does on the other. Needless to say that Maxtor's customer support wasn't any help.

Ok, enough bashing Maxtor..

Quote[/b] ]I've had a Western Digital Raptor 10000rpm 36GB HD for about a year and a half now, and it's run really really well

I might give it a go and get my dedicated OFP server one of those. The average seek times reported on those Raptors are almost half of the normal 7200rpm drives.

[j w 0]

but refuses to boot as a master for some reason so I have to use it purely as a storage drive.

You have the right connection set on the IDE/SATA-connector. Sometimes you dont have the little pin for slave, sometimes you have to put it master manually, but often it's Cable Select. Check it out, that may be the problem.

Yeah I had everything set right, just windows would not boot when installed to that drive no matter what, one time it even corrupted the windows installation between attempts to boot into windows, in the end I decided it was safer to use solely for storage

Well, if you already have a Windows installed on a drive, that is like set to primary, no matter what. I tried to put in a disk with Win NT in a computer that already had Win XP on another drive, the whole computer wouldn't even start.

I think it's some kind of collision of the OS's that may cause those problems.

[Artak 0]

If you put in a new drive with OS to a computer with a drive with existing OS you need to configure the boot.ini file to match the new setup, and with some luck you'll be able to choose which OS to boot

As a general rule, installing two OS's to same partition is a no-no, but can be done to different partitions and certainly different drives.

Talking about Wind0$e here.

I don't have time to read the first posts right now, but as the title says "drive about to fail, any advice", then get a new drive from preferrably Seagate or Samsung or Western Digital ect. If you can get your hands on a disk image tool such as Norton Ghost for example, you can use it to mirror copy the old, about to fail, drive to the new one. Set the new drive as master boot disk and the old one as a slave working for backups and storage. This way you can continue your business like nothing ever happened.

[crashdome 3]

Hold on just a second here folks, there's a nasty little devil in the details. Sure, you can a WD2000JB for $92, but the fine print says it's an 'OEM' drive. No problem, that's just a 133t way to get cheap stuff right?

WRONG.

What that means is the manufacturer gives you no warranty at all. Zero. Nada. Zip. Your vendor, if you're lucky, might give you 90 days exchange for defective merchandise. (the fine print says they can get up to two years for pass-through, but that's if they buy direct, not through a channel distributor)

ummm... even the 'crappy' Maxtor OEM drives come with a 5-year manufacturer's warranty. I'd seriously recheck who you are buying from if it is not the case for you.

I guess since I have so many disks... if one or two went bad it doesn't phase me - so I may be a bit aloof about my choices. I still say any brand is going to fail for you at some point.... whether it's Maxtor or not. Just check the Internet... you can find a group of people who's opinion of XYZ brand is that they suck horribly and whatever you buy from them will burn through your hands and summon the devil himself.

[Espectro (DayZ) 0]

Get a Samsung, they are reliable and quiet -although a little more expensive than the others. On a side-note, I have a maxtor and a seagate. The seagate have been running fine so far (7 months now), and the maxtor is still running. I have had many problems with bad sectors with the maxtor though.... Resulting in several emergency formats with a followup on backup software.

[shinRaiden 0]

http://support.wdc.com/warranty/policy.asp

Quote[/b] ]

If your Product was purchased as a component integrated within a system by a system manufacturer, no limited warranty is provided by WD. Please contact the place of purchase or the system manufacturer directly for warranty service.

ie OEM drives in a sack on the shelf are not covered by Western Digital.

[EiZei 0]

http://support.wdc.com/warranty/policy.asp

Quote[/b] ]

If your Product was purchased as a component integrated within a system by a system manufacturer, no limited warranty is provided by WD. Please contact the place of purchase or the system manufacturer directly for warranty service.

ie OEM drives in a sack on the shelf are not covered by Western Digital.

Checked WD OEM drives too and they have 3-year warranties at least here. Maybe it really does mean drives shipped with new computers only?

Also checked newegg.com, as far as I know it's an american reseller and even their cheapest 50USD OEM drives seem to come with a manufacturer warranty.

[shadow 6]

you can find a group of people who's opinion of XYZ brand is that they suck horribly and whatever you buy from them will burn through your hands and summon the devil himself.

Thats Maxtor right there  

ShinRaiden, there's a difference between a OEM WD drive and a OEM WD drive that comes with a computer. If a WD-drive comes in a IBM TP, then IBM covers the warranty of that WD drive. If the WD-drive is pure OEM (packaged in a anti-static bag) then WD's OEM warranty is in effect. I believe its 3 years now.

I think you mixed up OEM's no support-policy with no warranty-policy.

With OEM you don't get the same support as with retail. MS does'nt have any support for OEM products. If the reseller does'nt offer any support then you are SOL if you need it (or pay for expensive support at MS).

I assume the same applies for HD manufacturers.

[Kyle_K_ski 1]

Hello All,

I'd like to vigorously thank everyone who contributed suggestions on the behalf of my ailing computer, my wife and myself.

The good news is that I was able to backup all of our critical files, including the last three months' worth of family pictures.

Thus far Razorace's comments from LucasForums struck a chord with me. He speculated that "...If you have multiple bad sectors all over the place, it's probably time to get a new harddrive. If no, it could have just been a fluke. This sort of thing can happen if you turn off the computer while it's accessing the harddrive..."

What's interesting is the fact that I rebooted my computer BEFORE my wife accessed it. She said that when she went to the computer, it was still on my User Account, which should NOT have been still active since I set it to reboot before I left the room. For some reason, it didn't complete rebooting. My wife, not knowing that the computer was trying to reboot, logged out of my account and she then tried logging into her's, and that's when the computer froze up. When she restarted the computer it would not load up Windows.

So maybe Razorace's conjecture is accurate; it only APPEARS that my hard drive is failing because the computer turned off while it was accessing the hard drive. I then also followed up on Dtriniman's advice, I downloaded and ran CCleaner (what a GREAT program, by the way), and then I defragged my system. It needed defragging BADLY, as almost the whole entirety of the analysis bar was red in color!

All of this being said, we still need to know if our hard drive really is doing okay, because if it has multiple sectors damaged then we need to get a replacement hard drive ASAP.

So now I'm asking for some more advice. How do I execute a SCAN DISK including the SURFACE SCAN? I did a keyword search on Google, and I didn't come across anything that seemed useful.

Once more, I thank you in advance, and I look forward to any recommendations you may have in regards to enabling us to do a thorough scan of our hard drive.

Yours,

Kyle

March 10, 2006

: )

[shinRaiden 0]

you can find a group of people who's opinion of XYZ brand is that they suck horribly and whatever you buy from them will burn through your hands and summon the devil himself.

Thats Maxtor right there

ShinRaiden, there's a difference between a OEM WD drive and a OEM WD drive that comes with a computer. If a WD-drive comes in a IBM TP, then IBM covers the warranty of that WD drive. If the WD-drive is pure OEM (packaged in a anti-static bag) then WD's OEM warranty is in effect. I believe its 3 years now.

I think you mixed up OEM's no support-policy with no warranty-policy.

With OEM you don't get the same support as with retail. MS does'nt have any support for OEM products. If the reseller does'nt offer any support then you are SOL if you need it (or pay for expensive support at MS).

I assume the same applies for HD manufacturers.

No, this was a clear no-warranty case.

I bought an OEM drive in a sack off the stack behind the counter at the local DIY shop a year ago for my family's computer. It started blowing bits and running the serial number through WDC's site showed that it had a zero-day effective warranty. This was because it was put into the OEM channel and not the retail channel. Had I bought the drive as part of a store assembled PC, the store would have put a store n year warranty on all the parts, but because I built it they only gave a 90-day defective merchandise warranty.

What we did then was shut down the PC, bought a new drive, ran Ghost to snapshot the old drive, dumped the Ghost image to the new drive, then did the cleanup from there. It'll have to be reinstalled later for the yearly windows bloat anyway, but it got all the data.

[Kyle_K_ski 1]

Hello All,

Well, I'm 95% sure that my hard drive is going to soon fail. I went and updated my Sound Blaster Audigy 2 driver, yet no matter how often I uninstalled/reinstalled it, my computer refuses to produce any sounds. What's ironic is that had I NOT tried to update my driver, I most likely would still have sounds being produced.

But the "up side" of this, if you can call it that, is that I once again called Dell. They had me run an IDE diagnostic, and for the third time it came back with a one word summation of the state of my hard drive: "Failed." According to the Dell tech, the most likely reason why the SoundBlaster driver isn't working is that it's being written to a bad sector, and/or the old driver is being "removed" from a bad sector, and since the sector's bad, it's not being uninstalled correctly (Windows' "Add or Remove Programs" utility is listing that Sound Blaster Audigy 2 is STILL installed, even though I "uninstalled" it using Creative Mediasource, Sound Blaster's manufacturer's utility program. I have also run CCleaner numerous times to try and counter any kind of internal error, and all to no avail.

After all of these attempts to get SBA2 working, I tried a System Restore to a couple of days back; now every time it tries to startup Windows it takes me to a black screen with white font, giving me about 7 different startup options. The only ones that work are "Safe" and "Safe with networking." I have attempted restoring to earlier and earlier dates, all to the same effect.

My understanding of why these System Restores aren't working for me is due to the fact that they are trying to undue "alterations" that are, in fact, failures. They can't undue the effects of bad sectors.

I'm no longer able to access my external hard drive, as my computer states that it can no longer find it, nor does it recognize blank CDs or DVDs. And for some reason, when I load up in "Safe Mode with Networking," I'm only able to use the Internet haphazardly; most of the time the computer's unable to connect.

At this point in time, I see no other option other than to get us a new hard drive as soon as possible. I double checked who manufactured my current hard drive, and I know that this is going to be difficult for many of you to believe, but it was Seagate. So now I'm in a REAL quandry as to who to purchase it from, because supposedly Seagate is "the best," and it failed me. Just a note for clarity: I BABIED my hard drive. Not once have I so much as bumped it while it was on, or off, but it's still dying.

I certainly did not need this new expense, especially in light of having a 7 month old baby.

Thanks for all of your help on this matter. I'm certainly open to any more advice until my current drive fails me. I just want to be clear to all of my modding teammates and companions that if it seems like I suddenly disappeared off of the face of the earth, it's definately not due to a lack of interest. I'm just racing to scrounge up the funds to get a new replacement drive so I can once again contribute towards these worthy endeavors.

Yours!

Kyle

March 14, 2006

[theavonlady 2]

Did you say this is a 7 month old drive from Dell? If so, isn't it under warranty?

EDIT: Oops. A 7 month old baby! Never mind!

/avon disables evelyn woods speed reading mode

[shadow 6]

I double checked who manufactured my current hard drive, and I know that this is going to be difficult for many of you to believe, but it was Seagate.  So now I'm in a REAL quandry as to who to purchase it from, because supposedly Seagate is "the best," and it failed me.

Not hard to believe at all. Like I said earlier, any manufacturer can make a bad drive. I still recommend sticking to Seagates. One faulty drive does'nt mean anything.

[SpongeBob 0]

I've been a Maxtor user for 8 years now (about 6 drives in that time), never had a bad one. Sure they're loud, but I've got louder speakers, so its all good now.

[shadow 6]

Sure they're loud, but I've got louder speakers, so its all good now.

I still prefer a silent PC though.

[Kode 0]

perhaps you could use a seagate tool:

http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/utils.html (if you still can boot)

otherwise you could use a bootable floppy: http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/download/seatoold_en.exe

also available for a bootable CD:

bootable image of seagate tools

[Kyle_K_ski 1]

Can DBAN destroy more than my hard drive? verifying Gutmann

Hello All,

I just downloaded the latest beta of Derik's Boot And Nuke (a.k.a. "DBAN", and its forum is found here: http://www.snugserver.com/phpbb2....004239d ), and I'm hoping that a few of my questions can be answered before I use it. Needless to say, I'm nervous about using such a powerful and ultimately thorough tool, and any feedback would be greatly appreciated!

(1) Does DBAN target only the hard drive? I'm extremely nervous that DBAN will somehow "spill out" and shred/destroy other devices, such as the CD/DVD drive, the floppy drive, printer, monitor, etc., etc. I'm especially nervous that it'll also attack my Dell Dimension XPS' bootup and diagnostic (via the F2 and F12 keys), which loads up before the Windows XP operating system does; I've been told that this Dell feature is on its own chip, but I cannot say with absolute certainty that this is so. If it does also destroy the Dell bootup, is this something to be concerned about, or is it something that I can reinstall via the software they supplied to me?

(2) How can I verify that all of the passes for the Peter Gutmann 35 method have been properly executed? I don't want to interrupt this process prematurely.

(3) If I use the Gutmann method on my 200 GB hard drive, how long might it take to complete all of its passes?

(4) I was recommended to use DBAN in a last ditch effort to save my "dying" hard drive. I was told that it can be used to completely remagnetize the hard drive, possibly saving it from failure. Thus far, my hard drive is NOT producing any kind of mechanical failure sounds, so is it possible that DBAN can restore it to a "pristine" state so I can later reinstall the OS, software, and my backed up files?

Having to buy a new hard drive will really push our finances near the edge, so I'm hopeful that DBAN can help me avoid a new and costly purchase. Just so it's known, I have posted a copy of this help request on DBAN's forum, but I'm hoping that your extra know how will also lend some additional light on this matter.

Yours!

Kyle

March 17, 2006

[Kyle_K_ski 1]

Hello All,

This hearty "Thank you!" is directed to all of those who spent some time trying to assist me with my failing hard drive. I deeply appreciate all of the advice.

Unfortunately, we had to cough up $104 to replace our hard drive with a new one. The upside of this untimely investment is that I'm not getting any "dll" error messages with every startup, the system seems to be running slightly faster and smoother than before.

I only have one remaining question: my old hard drive is slaved to the new one. It had a couple of viruses that seemed to be beyond redress from either Zone Alarm or Microsoft's updates (this is in spite of the fact that Zone Alarm said that Microsoft's fixes would work on the viruses). Perhaps my hard drive's gradual errosion played a role in hindering their intended removal, but whatever the case, my question is this:

Do I have to worry about the viruses from the old drive infected my new one? One tech that I spoke with said that as long as I don't run any actual program off of the old drive, and as long as the files I'm bringing over are free of the viruses that I have nothing to worry about. Is this an accurate statement, or...?

I still have to finish scanning/bringing over a ton of files to the new drive, letters of recomendation to write for students of mine hoping to receive some grants/scholarships, and a resume to update and send out before I'll be able to deeply dive back into any of the modding endeavors I'm currently a member of, but I hope to be over this hurdle soon. I miss not being active in the modding community!

Again, thank you for all of your time and effort.

As always,

Yours!

Kyle

April 7, 2006

[shadow 6]

If the virus you have on the old drive was a memory-resident one then you have nothing to worry about (it resides on the boot-sector which you no longer use). If it is a virus that attacks EXE-files you dont want to run those EXE-files. Other than that you can move all the other data over without any risk of re-infection. I believe thats what the techie you talked with meant to say too.