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Hard drive NOT happy fun time!

P

Phosphers

n00b
Joined
Feb 7, 2003
Messages
53
The saga thus far....

So my lovely wd 120g drive flaked out on me some months ago. Convinced it was "bad" I bought a new seagate, which flaked out on me. After a fair bit of research I found out windows is stupid and will sometimes switch to PIO mode! Yay!

Switching back to DMA fixed the speed problem on both drives but the WD still wouldn't pass scandisk. On a suggestion from someone I ran chkdsk on it and found out it had a problem with the MFT. Only reason for the MFT error I can think of is it was writting/reading to the drive when windows crashed.

So.... It seems the drive *is not bad*. But is there any definiative way to find out whether it's usable for the long term? I'm tempted to RMA it anyways since the warrenty runs out in december, but if there's nothing "wrong" with it they'll probably refuse the RMA.
On the topic of PIO/DMA my plextor seems stuck in PIO mode 4 whereas my NEC DVD is at least ata33. Is this how they're supposed to be or do I have (even) more issues?

Blah, I hate dealing with this stuff.
 
Replace the ide cables and also check the ports that they plug into are not bad/going bad.
 
Run the WD Data LifeGuard tools in addition to checkign cables. Report back what the tools say.

Also, a gentle reminder that no hard drive brand is perfect. They are mechanical devices that can, do, and will fail. To believe otherwise about a particular brand is unrealistic. On the lfip side of this is the fact that environmental hazards are more likely to kill a drive than a manufacturing defect within the drive itself. Keep it real please.
 
I replaced the old cable with the one from the seagate retail package. The reason I was also having problems with the seagate was the damned stupid PIO mode. Near as I can tell the seagate is fine and dandy.

The WD passes all the Lifeguard tests, and even scandisk now, after the chkdsk. Before it'd pass all the tests and throw errors on scandisk. Passes SMART test also.

Near as I can tell the IDE controller isn't bad either. Come to think of it, I don't think I tried either drive on the highpoint RAID controller. That might've shown the problem much earlier.
 
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