HDD 'died' cyclic redundancy error

Well you can get a Seagate 300 GB for $89.90 shipped from a couple places listed on pricewatch, but that's not really relevant here anyway since the data is the item of discussion, not the failed drive it currently resides on.

Graham

Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor...

Keyed more toward installing. Knoppix is keyed heavily toward good auto detect routines for hardware, and a great driver compliment. So it nearly always gets you into the gui, and if the drive lives, you'll see it. Burn a disc or two of it's contents and make a doorstop out of it.

All of which are brands history has noted for premature failure.

There's only one brand of HDD I learned to trust and that was Quantum.

Graham

Don't give up, Linux is very rewarding and worth the effort! I run Kubuntu on a PIII 500MHz desktop with 384MB RAM and it gives me no problems. I also have Linux on a Duron 1300MHz desktop with 384MB RAM, an HP Omnibook 6100 laptop (PIII 1GHz, 384MB RAM) and a Duron 1600 with 1GB RAM I use as a server. None are what I'd describe as fairly modern!

I've successfully run other distros on old hardware as well. The only problems I've encountered have been graphics related, i.e. the card or monitor being incorrectly identified resulting in a sync output incompatible with the monitor and a blank screen, or issues with PCI/interrupt routing. Both have been very easily fixed though- one thing Linux doesn't lack is documentation, FAQs and howtos!

However, while Linux generally runs on just about anything, (sometimes with a bit of tweaking), like just about all modern OSes it does like a lot of RAM. You can just about get away with running X on 128MB but I wouldn't recommend less than 256MB. Laptops can be tricky (wireless LAN etc) but still not too much bother if you can find open source drivers for some of the 'funny' hardware they often have. Morse

They aren't called "Deathstars" just to be cute.

Nah. It's well beyond that period.

Graham

Never tried one after their eighties problems with severe sticktion. Loved their fix, too; make the motors pull harder to break the heads loose.

Heck, they aren't even called "IBM" any more.

Well, even IBM had SOME standards. They ran their hard drive division into the toilet, then liquidated what was left, to another company. :(

On Thu, 19 Jul 2007 00:02:02 +0100, Eeyore put finger to keyboard and composed:

I don't use Windows XP, but I know that its command interpreter is actually cmd.exe.

As for the CRC error, I don't understand why invoking a file on the [good?] master drive would be a problem, unless the slave was hanging up the IDE channel. To eliminate this possibility, I'd move the Deskstar to the secondary IDE channel, on its own, configured as master.

AIUI, when a 512 byte sector is written to a HD, the HD's controller calculates a CRC for that sector and writes it to the HD. When the data is retrieved from the HD, the controller recomputes a new CRC and checks to see that it matches the one that was recorded with the original data.

I'd use the manufacturer's diagnostic utility to do a sector by sector scan of the HD.

IBM/Hitachi Drive Fitness Test:

Or you could try Scandisk with a thorough surface scan.

- Franc Zabkar

So, its 'bloody' junk?

Could you make any more of a nebulous remark? For one thing all drives eventually fail. "Premature failure" is about as off the wall as it gets.

Which has just as poor a record.

You need to look at the numbers. Seagate has made millions of drives. Quantum? Not nearly so many. So seagate could have ten times more drives fail in a given period and still have the same record as quantum with their single failure for each ten.

All IBM drives are STILL called IBM drives.

ALL NEW drives made in said IBM facilities are now called Hitachi drives, since Hitachi bought IBM's HD manufacturing arm and related technologies.

In message , Eeyore writes

Get a copy of Spinrite. It works for errors like the one you have. There are other tools which are for filesystem corruption and lost files/partitions but it sounds like you have something a little 'lower level' than that.

In message , Franc Zabkar writes

Umm, actually, XP has command.com as well.

Bullshit. Maybe from a sales POV. IBM is (was) at the pinnacle of HD storage technology. They were the leaders which WD and Seagate followed. IBM was the leader in MR Head technology, and had the record for lineal density on horizontal method MR technology. They also have their own perpendicular recording mode work that was top notch. Do you really think Hitachi would have wanted to buy a dog?

Nice try. Do you even know how much they got for it?

Oddly cmd.exe and command.com behave slightly differently under xp, but they both do the same thing.