40Gb Western Digital hard drive

The problems and solutions may be coincidental. There isn't much you can do to make the repair more reliable nor are there consumer grade diagnostics that can pinpoint problems. I revived a 120 gig Maxtor a week ago by swapping the electronics with an exact twin I had in the scrap box. The drive just quit. Made no noise, platters didn't spin. Replaced the electronics board, problem solved and friend didn't lose his OS or data.

eMachines are... well, we won't go there! :-/

What machine did ou have this running in?

I think drive manufacturers cite something like 40% (? more?) of drive returns have "No defect found". (something to keep in mind).

The first thing I would do is move the drive to a known

*reliable* machine (perhaps on the secondary controller or as a slave, etc.) and see how well it runs. You may discover that the machine you were having problems with was the problem! (bad caps, bad power supply, etc.)

e-Machines are not the best quality. The power supplies and fans are the first to go. CDROM and floppy are next. After that, the motherboard.

Model number? Series? The Protege series were tolerable. Protoge would last about 4 years and blow up. The Caviar series would last perhaps 2 years and blow up. About 1/3 of the pile is WD, mostly 40GB but some 80 and 120GB.

(New drives, boxed drives, and SCSI arrays are buried elsewhere).

What does that mean? Did the drive fail, or was there some other problem? It's highly likely that the drive failed.

Ummmm.... Ubuntu 10.04 is the current version.

The WD diagnostics will pronounce a failing drive to be good. What did you expect? Fire up SmartMonTools in Ubuntu and extract the S.M.A.R.T. statistics. You'll find one of three possible results, depending on WD drive model:

1. Lots of errors and pronouncement of imminent failure. This is what you get with the later drives. I don't think any of the 40GB drives are late enough to produce an honest result.
2. Absolutely perfect drive with no errors. This is what I usually see. WD lies on its S.M.A.R.T. stats.
3. Can't obtain S.M.A.R.T. That's what I see when someone has juggled controller cards. I also see that when there's a controller failure.

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# Jeff Liebermann 150 Felker St #D Santa Cruz CA 95060
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# http://802.11junk.com               jeffl@cruzio.com
# http://www.LearnByDestroying.com               AE6KS

They are made to sell at a low price point, like the Yugo.

On Fri, 28 May 2010 14:47:25 -0700 (PDT), mike put finger to keyboard and composed:

You can use MHDD to test each sector:

AIUI, MHDD measures the time required to retrieve data from each block of sectors. Any bad or weak sector will require one or more retries. Each retry requires an additional revolution. At the end of the test MHDD reports the number of 5ms, 15ms, 50ms, 150ms, 500ms and >500ms blocks.

Here is a screenshot:

MHDD Documentation:

EZ-bios is a disk drive overlay (DDO) which loads a small TSR program into memory to allow a PC to overcome lack of BIOS support for LBA mode. It was used to overcome BIOS limitations such as 528MB and

28-bit LBA (128GiB / 137GB).

EZ-bios works by overwriting the boot code in sector 0 of your HD with its own MBR code. The remainder of the TSR code is stored within track

2. I suspect that by restoring track 0, you actually overwrote the EZ-bios code, which would have left you where you started.

- Franc Zabkar

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I 'spose that may be why the E-machine 'puters at the scrapyard are usually still intact.

A Franken-machine, with an Asus MB that I recently replaced some bad caps in; all the other components have been sitting around, salvaged from other broken systems for long enough that I no longer know what their origin is.

Yeah, definitely a possibility...

Thanks, Mike

>

The first one I owned had been a neighbor's that got blown up when their incoming power lost the nuetra at about age 3 - I replaced the PSU and the modem and used it for another 3 years, Prior to it failing I'd noticed that some of the caps on the MB were starting to bulge, and about six months or so later it finally just wouldn't start one day. I'm glad to hear that about the cd drives, I've got plenty of spares, I think even a burner or two. Floppies in working condition are becoming much less prevalent these days (my source always being the scrapyard, of course:)

Caviar, can't get a look at the model # right at the moment, but if it quits again I'll write it down.

Wow, nice collection!

Well, I had several browser windows open and of a sudden the bowser was stuck viewing the last one I'd been looking at - the mouse cursor would still move around as it should but clicking on stuff had no effect. Couldn't close any browser windows, couldn't start up any other programs, couldn't shutdown the machine, except by pushing and holding down the power button.

I haven't tried anything newer than 9.10, after I tried and failed to figure how to get my modem working with it I went back to 8.04, which seems much more intuitive to me.

Thanks, I'll have to see if I can get this SmartMonTools in 8.04.

With all the HP computers that were built with the same motherboards and power supplies?

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Anyone wanting to run for any political office in the US should have to
have a DD214, and a honorable discharge.

All right, that definitely looks like a keeper...

Thanks, I'll be spending some time with it in the near future.

Thanks for the explanation - so, I guess maybe some part of the info on the drive was corrupted and I just basically refreshed things - wonder if I should try installing EZ-bios again (just kidding, at least while it's still working).

Mike

HP's used Bestec too? damn, that's too bad. Back in the eighties when I worked on medical gear it seemed that HP's equipment was some of the most robust (but of course, usually more expensive, too).

Thanks, Mike

That was what is now Agilent. They still adhere to the _original_ HP principles. Jonesy

Very interesting, thanks!

Mike

On Sat, 29 May 2010 03:18:18 -0700, mike ??o??:

I own a 2005 eMachine, 2.0 ghz AMD Athalon64. It's now a Windows 7 machine and does its job flawlessly. Just like any other brand you need to know what you are buying within the brand name. Being semi-retired from the IT world now since 2008 I've seen plenty of junk out there with Compac, HP, Sony, Toshiba badges on them. One thing you need to understand is not many if any make 100% of their own components. So you should not make global statements condemning the badge name without this knowledge.

On Fri, 28 May 2010 19:04:22 -0700, Jeff Liebermann ??o??:

Geez you've just described about every computer out there.

2005 emachines T6216

Original power supply, Check! Original mainboard, Check! Original fans, Check!

LiteOn DVDRW failed year number 2. So did it's LiteOn replacement last year.

Now have 16x16 Pioneer DVRW I bought in 2004. Still works well.

Moral of story, if you buy cheap stuff it will fail. Too bad that's pretty much what you will find OEM-wise in this throw-away world.

I buy piles of them from the local recyclers. Those are the ones that work. You should see the piles and piles that didn't.

Basically, the operating system got lost. That could be anything. Bad motherboard, flakey IDE device, flakey plug in card, or even a bad keyboard/mouse can hang the machine. However, it also can be a bad sector on the HD. If you can get it to boot, try scanning the HD for bad sectors and disallocating them. Then, keep track of the number of bad sectors on the drive. Any increase, and it's eWaste.

What's a modem? Is that like dialup? I use those when desperate or visting stone age retro enthusiasts.

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Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

I had someone bragging about how much better his HP computer was, than the eMachines computer sitting by my bench. I opened both. They were both shipped with the same motherboard and power supply. The same brand of CD-ROM drive and amount of RAM. Both had a 3.5" floppy drive. Neither were cheap crap. He paid over twice the price of the emachines computer for the same hardware.

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Anyone wanting to run for any political office in the US should have to
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I've yet to buy new, so I'm always stuck with whatever is already there. However, it always cheers me to find inside a MB made by Intel and a PSU with a name like Astec or Antec, or even John Deere, I've had pretty good service out those.

I bought an LG dvd burner a couple years ago from a former IT guy and it is really phenomenal at reading dvds even when they're covered with finger prints and scratches (like a lot of the ones at the local library have), whereas, none of my previous burners (grand total of 2) would be able to read 'em, at least not error free.

I had pretty good service with a T1742 that a neighbor gave me, it had an Intel MB, and didn't have a Bestec PSU. The 3 I found at the scrapyard all had failed Bestec PSU's, which became notorious for not having a crowbar circuit to shut down the outputs if they went over-voltage. Maybe they started using a better PSU, the last blown up one I found was a T2862 or something like that, I suspect a few years older than your 2005 model.

On Sat, 29 May 2010 13:55:56 -0700, mike ??o??:

The 6212 was the first and only eMachines so far I've owned. MSI mobo, nVidia Nforce chipset. Came with XP. I replaced the 160 gig PATA drive with a 320 gig SATA and was just going to reinstall and keep the original but I'll be damned if i could locate the correct chipset drivers and I'm no neub at searching for stuff like that. I ended up cloning the 160 to the 320 with Acronis Easy Migrate or Migrate Easy or whatever they call it cuz it had a 15 day fully functional trial. Worked like a charm. Set the

160 on the shelf in case of catastrophic failure. Then I wanted an external so i bought a WD 500 gig USB. The case failed after a month so out came the drive and into the 6212 case it went. Bought Win7 a while back, nuked XP (well Win7 nuked it) and that's what I use for some specialized stuff. Most of the internet is on this Toshiba 1905 laptop with Mandriva 2010 linux installed.

Hmm, you must work on 'puters alot! One of my favorite places to hang out up till a couple years ago was the local 'puter recycler - I'd go there at least every other week and end up spending all my disposable income for the week (all 2 dollars of it :) . When the bottom dropped out of that market they had to close since none of the outfits they'd been sending the stuff to would give them any money for it any more. I miss that place, the guy who ran it was formerly a corporate IT guy, they always had some kind of great deals going on.

OK, now I've got a couple new programs to learn, I'll be setting up a spare-parts machine so I can dig into this further, maybe restore some of the older pieces of hardware I've got hanging about, or at least classify as to whether I need to hang onto or not.

Yeah, I know, I seem to keep slipping back into the stone age, been that way since 1993, one step forward, etc.. There's DSL at work so at least I'm getting a little familiar with that - kinda makes surfing at home at 56K a bit of a drag though...

Ah, thanks for the link!