IDE interface bad ...

I had a non-mechanical problem with a hard drive that started acting screwy and wouldn't format.

I also had an ASUS CD ROM drive fail because of PROM failure. The symptoms were weird.

Happened on a Western Digital a few months ago. It was a SATA drive that continued to just slow down in data transfer rates. I had it not as a system drive but as a storage drive. The file system was ext3 and after the drive's performance decreased by about half I ran a check including bad block test that turned up empty. I managed to get all my data off the drive onto the system drive (a 320 gig Seagate SATA) but just barely. Data transfer slowed down from about 40 MB/s to just 1 MB/sec then the drive could not be read at all. No noise, no frantic seeking. After a reboot the mainboard drive controller's SMART technology reported BAD and in the trash went the drive. I replaced it with a 500 gigabyte Western Digital SATA I paid around 60 quid for. It was an external MyBook drive that the power controller inside the case failed so I just removed the drive. Funny that at that time the external drive was actually cheaper than an internal.

If it was locking up the bus it was most likely neither, it was most likely the electronics on the drive that was going out.

God works in mysterious ways ! ;~)

Graham

I did but in my case it was very clear what the problem was. The loud noises coming from the hard drive game me a good indication of what was causing the problem. In my case I even if it was the mobo or DVD drive, both were under warranty and I had put the hard drive in my old PC in there to transfer everything and just left it in there. I suppose it was lucky that I had not decided to use it to store data.

On Sun, 6 Jul 2008 15:43:03 +0100, "Arfa Daily" put finger to keyboard and composed:

If a drive has bad blocks, then Windows will appear to hang while it repeatedly retries the affected reads or writes. If a drive doesn't spin up, then the BIOS may appear to hang while it is waiting for it to do so. Eventually it should time out and move on.

I have two Fujitsu drives that have a faulty Cirrus Logic IC. This model series featured in a law suit. The failure symptoms are sometimes as you describe, while at other times I will get reams of bad blocks which come good on the next try.

- Franc Zabkar

Very common ! If its still under warranty return it to Seagate. Since the lead free thing I've seem a number of problems like this. A common one is the the solder joints behind the connector seem to fail. I just go over the bad ones with a soldering iron and fresh solder. You can actually see the cracks with a 20X loupe.

You try getting Fujitsu to replace them ! No way ! I will not under any circumstances buy their drives... Not even if they gave them away !

I had problems with a Dell Poweredge server and 1 of the 3 factory installed Fujitsu drives 1 day after setting it up. They sent another Fujitsu drive and that lasted a month. Dell sent yet another replacement and a few weeks later one of the original drives failed. I talked the owner into buying 3 Seagate drives and I reinstalled the operating system and restored data from the backup. The server is still in use after 4 years.

I've never had problems with Dell's services. Fujitsu will tell you to return the drive to the original vendor. Which is fine if the original vendor still exists. An awful lot of Fujitsu drives were sold by vendors that vanished within a few months. I know of one that traded under three different names from the same address. But none of those names were the one that he used to make purchases with, from the manufacturers !

I never had any problems with them either but I wasn't going to play the hard drive swap game forever and make myself look like a fool in the eyes of the person I recommended Dell to. And they wouldn't send anything but Fujitsu so rather than risk down time and lose sales the server owner realized replacing the drives on our own was the better option. The business was a country club with an 18 hole golf course and this was in the start of their busiest part of the season. The system powered all their point of sale touch screen terminals and also controlled the golfing part taking reservations, scheduling tee times, printing tee sheets, even the starters had terminals to confirm stuff. The next Dell Poweredge I installed a few months later came with WD drives.

I have a box full of various interface/size used drives none of witch are Fujitsu.

In one of the latest trade rags I get, there was an article citing the shorter than usual life of the larger (e.g. > 320 GB) hard drives. One mfg in particular (and I don't remember the name) was having more trouble than the others, but, they all were having probs. Various reasons were given, but the two things most discussed were heat and the high density on the platters...So, at the very least, make sure the disk is well ventilated...You can't do much about the other... John

Hosed controller board, probably shorting a few data lines.

hi, why have you got it in cable select ? i thought u are supposed to have it as master and slave ? have u tried it like that ? mark k