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HDD Help, Please!!!!

A

arock1_3

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jul 6, 2004
Messages
1,141
I bought two Maxtor 60gb each and one took a crap about two weeks ago. Now the other one after I installed it was running fine until today. I noticed when I started to install programs in the pc that got a message telling me that the c: drive was running out of space and I had only installed 3 games ( and I'm talking about a kiddie games, in other words they don't take much space) and when I checked it was showing only a total of 2gb when the hdd like I said is 60.

I checked the bios and is recognizing the 60 but not XP. Like I said it was not doing that before. Should I try to reformat the hdd and reinstalled XP or should I get a new hdd. Both of them I bought them used from someone in the forum and I don't know if this is something that you should by used. What should I do?

Is an old system
P2 333 mhz cpu
PC100 320 mb
WinXP pro
Unknown Vid card(at least i don't know the brand right now, but i can check if necesary)
 
who did you buy them from?

i'd give them negative heat if you can, and post a message in their fs/t thread about this.

the only way this could happen would be if the drives were (a) defective or (b) really, really old, and i believe that either way, the seller would have known this.
 
starhawk said:
the only way this could happen would be if the drives were (a) defective or (b) really, really old, and i believe that either way, the seller would have known this.
Click to expand...

SR FAQ

Q. Which Brand of Hard Drive is Most Reliable?

A. With the exception of a few models with outright design problems (the IBM 75GXP for one) or the odd bad batch, most hard drives from all manufacturers are similar in reliability when they leave the factory. There is no point saying Maxtor is more reliable than WD or Seagate is more reliable than Maxtor unless you have used hundreds of hard drives and have a sufficient sample to draw from. Most people drawing on their experience with a dozen drives will come to a completely biased conclusion because their sample is not even remotely representative of the population.

The most common cause of HD failures is mishandling/abuse during shipping/storage and integration (*1). If you think about it, there are so many opportunities for this kind of mishandling/abuse to take place once a drive leaves the factory: shipping/sorting from the factory to national distributors, storage/handling at the national depot, shipping/sorting to local distributors, storage/handling at the local distributors, shipping/sorting to the retailers, storage/handling at the retailers, handling/integration by the retailer or consumer.

If you have ever seen couriers playing soccer with your packages, you will know how shipping can damage a drive. If you have ever seen packages tumble down conveyor belts into sorting bins at a courier's sorting facility, you will know how sorting can damage a drive. If you have ever seen how some distributors and retailers pour drives out of a box onto a table and stack them 20 high on top of each other, you will know how handling at the distributor/retail level can damage a drive. If you have ever seen how some people install drives into a PC, you will know how integration can damage a drive.

It is not right to say Brand X drives are unreliable because the vast majority (>99% usually) of hard drives from any manufacturer leave the factory in a perfectly reliable state. If you want to blame people, look at the rest of the marketing channel downstream from the HD manufacturer. Of course, if a particular brand of drive is consistently unreliable in your area, it could be symptomatic of a careless distributor or shipping company that deals exclusively with that brand of drive — I guess the only solution would be to avoid buying that brand of drive. But to broadcast it on the Net that this brand of drive is unreliable is misleading.

-I forgot to add this point: (Sep 25/03)

(*1) That said, non-operating shock tolerance could be a determining factor in the reliability of a drive because it may allow the drive to survive indelicate handling by couriers, distributors, retailers, and consumers. It follows, then, that FDB equipped drives, which generally increase the non-operating shock tolerance of a drive, are potentially more reliable than their ball bearing equipped counterparts.
Click to expand...

blaming the seller is not very likely to be productive
how where they packed and shipped?

I always place new drives in redundant arrays or with only non-critical (backed up) data as single drives
for a good couple of months before I "trust" them
if they havent developed problems form shipping or mishandling by then they likely wont

Id run the manufacturers diagnostic first
then look at it from knoppix (rules out OS as the problem)
then zero the drive and see if it locks out the sectors again
 
Well to be quite honest with you I don't want to blame the seller because he is a good guy and is like you say it could of happen in the shipping process. Now the first one did not work from the start and the other one lasted well like I said until today, which is like two months. The pc that was in I turn it on about five times cause upgraded a few thing s because it was a Christmas present for my 3 year old. That's what pisses me off the most. :mad:
 
ouch.

what model drives are they and what method of shipping were they sent on?

tip: if you can eliminate it being a physical cause in both of the drives, then get duplicates and swap the driver cards (the card that sits on top of the drive itself)

i came up with this method to make it so that i could possibly recover the data in this ancient 386 that i love (i learned to program on it) anyone got a quantum 80mb ide drive?

sorry to accidentally thread hijack there arock...
 
circuit board swapping is always problematic
lots of changes occur within any model line
so even though it looks like the right board it could still be totally useless even if fully functional, firmware that matches for starters, the actual low level format matching
(by this I mean the real low level format, description ogf the sectors, tracks and cylinders, as described on the circuit board matching the real structures as formatted at the factory on the platter)

of people that have tried to do it
Id say only 1 in 8 actually manage to pull it off
largely because they dont give up and do some serious researching
some makes are much better than others as well, Maxtor was quite helpful for one member
WD told another it was impossible

catestrophic failures are generally circuit board related
one of the ICs got fried, either fast from a power surge or ESD event
or slow from electromigration and gives up the ghost
shipping damage is generally mechanical and likely headslap and its ejected debri finally killing the head and platter
a drive that has done that need not sound bad, but that is sometime the case
clicking is the drive recalibrating (and is normal to deal with thermal expansion, but it should stop once it reaches a stable operating temperature), and an endless loop (the click of death)
means it cant accurately locate the servobursts it uses to align itself
not a good sign

as a drive goes bad it will often start to loose sector these being locked out by the drive
(there are a limited amount of spare sectors that replace them) once you start to see sectors dissappear that a bad sign

but loosing that much space in one fell swoop isnt "typical" of any of those
so Id run the diagnostic and see whats up
 
Yes I have had a 'sample size' of over 100 of maxtor over the years.
almolst every single maxtor ive ever seen has failed without exception.
there is only one that hasn't so far, and that one is sitting in my girlfriend's box. it's a 40GB, it's thinner then normal, and Im just waiting for it to go out. it's got a backup sitting spinned down beside it ready for it to, its all ghosted up and everything. maybe it won't go out because its replacement is ready ;)

anyways, randomness is, despite a lot of peoples' thoughts, very very streaky. you can flip a quarter 6 times and get heads all 6 times. the only time you can truly get randomness is when you get a sample of thousands. hundreds won''t do it.

However, the failures aren't why I will never get maxtor, it's the lack of ease of RMA. customer support is half the reason I buy anything nowadays, and WD wins that battle hands down for me. So does ATI. its worth shelling out a bit extra to me for that. I'm never going to buy another used hard drive again in my life after this fiasco. New only and WD only. I am not sure I will ever buy SCSI again either.

in short, my point is this: don't uy used, and only uy stuff that you are sure you can RMA, or you will end up eating your 'investment'.
 
LadyJaqie said:
Yes, pity you can never truly LLF an IDE/ATA drive.
Click to expand...
Which is why the formats need to match. He's not talking about making them fit, he means you need to match them.

Me? I have a pile of literally 12 dead WD hard drives sitting right here. I'm not buying a WD any time soon.

If they still worked, think what kind of a raid array they'd make. RAID-5 or maybe 1+0, of course. I wouldn't even trust my new seagates to raid0 alone. Write speeds thru the roof, I bet. :( too bad they're all DEAD.
 
odd Ive never even had that many WDs fail, then again I treat them right. too many people don't know how.

and WD ive personally installed and lorded over well over 400 drives for years.

P.S. did you ever try RMAing them? WD's RMA department (the few times ive had to use it, and thats always been when someone mistreated their drive) has been superb.
 
unhappy_mage said:
Me? I have a pile of literally 12 dead WD hard drives sitting right
Click to expand...

strange I do too
only they are all chugging along past their warranty :p

as my post above points out being on the recieving end of the wrong distribution channel can explain alot
the manufacturer that I gather (empirically from these boards) with the best trackrecord would be Seagate

I think this has more to do with their packaging , distribution channel and education process for that channel and the end user, then the drives themselves

LadyJaqie randomness is streaky (even sneaky) :p
but you forgot all about O'Leary's Law
you know the one that says Murphy was a pie in the sky optimist :p
 
i'm sort of like ice czar... i've got 2 wd's sitting in a p1 150 (the one in my fs/t thread to be exact) right now and they both work... and are both old enough to be the original drives (i think)

i'm also about halfway like ladyjaqui (not counting gender- i am male) in that i have a friend... whose maxtor just died (almost- multiple physical errors, clicks really bad and takes forever and a day to access... yet still works (!) barely...)

so how would i go about finding the board i need for my 80mb quantum hdd, ice?
what info do i need, etc.?
 
well...

the model number is the best place to start
for instance the base model number of my WDs are
WD400BB
but thats just half of it
Model:WD400BB-00CAA0
Date: 12 Feb 2002
DCM: DSFHCV2A8
(they are all different without a single repeat over 12 HDDs)

trying to get as close to the information supplied on the lable as possible is where youd start,
many sellers on ebay would supply that information on request
also since its Maxtor, support might be able to tell you what other compatible circuitboards are out there

they did in one notable case on this board
unfortunately that predates my becoming a ghost of myself,
and I cant access that thread with any reasonable search term
Ice Czar "guest" isnt searchable as a user, and it might even predate the upgrade to VB3
in which case its gone
 
Sorry for my abcense but my daughter is a little sick but doing better. Well I had the chance to go to the maxtor website and found this software called powermax to test the hdd and it came out good. So what I did was reformat the hdd with that same program and so far is working like a champ. Now I'm planning on doing the same thing to the other one that I was about to throw away to see if it'll fix it. :)
 
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