🚀 go-pugleaf

random faults are a big pain in butt.  the last time i had random faults
(hard drive would just lock up), i replaced the drive and everything was
fine.  unfortunately, it could be anything, including your hard drive
controller, cables, etc.

In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage Ian Lowery <ianl@nospam.curie.dialix.com.au> wrote:
> I had a very mysterious hard drive crash and resurrection recently,
> and it has me rather mystified.

> The drive is a Quantum KA, 13 Gb, and only 8 months old. It has
> multiple logical drives in the extended partition (FAT16) and a small
> primary partition to allow booting into multiple operating systems.

> The problem started when no OSs became bootable, major corruption was
> found on the primary partition, and all logical drives in the extended
> partition had disappeared. I booted a vanilla WIn 98 version of DOS
> from floppy and ran a surface scan from Norton Disk Doctor which found
> oodles of bad sectors in the primary partition. 

> I resurrected all but the first of the logical drives in the extended
> partition and then tried copying essential stuff from these drives to
> a second physical drive. At this point it seemed as though there was a
> serious problem with the corrupted drive, for although it is a fast
> drive normally, it took 4 hours to copy 500 MB, apparently doing
> multiple seeks and retries on dodgey sectors.

> In the FAT on the primary partition I marked all sectors as unused
> (hence good) and ran Norton Disk Doctor again. Even in normal mode the
> surface scan was taking ages and was finding bad sectors everywhere.
> Thinking it may be Disk Doctor I aborted, remarked the sectors as
> unused, and ran ScanDisk with the same results. 

> I decided to FDISK the drive and create one FAT 32 partition which I
> would surface test and find all the bad sectors. FDISK reported that
> the drive had integrity problems but created the drive anyway, and I
> set about formatting it. No go, FORMAT.COM (with no switches) reported
> that the system area of the drive was stuffed and the drive was
> unuseable.

> I booted into Windows 98 on the other hard drive and tried formatting
> from within My Computer. Low and behold, after about 10 minutes the
> program reported that the drive had been formatted. I then ran
> ScanDisk from within Windows and it reported that there were no
> errors. Not believing it, I went to DOS and ran Norton Disc Doctor's
> surface scan, and it found no errors, nor did the DOS based ScanDisk.

> I repartitioned to FAT16 and reinstalled the system as was, and it has
> had no problem since. I have rerun comprehensive surface scans and
> there have been no bad sectors.

> So what happened? The bad sectors were real, they weren't an artefact
> from a corrupted FAT, I had marked all sectors in the FAT as unused
> (and hence good), and the surface scan programs then marked them as
> bad. Every surface scan I ran took ages to run, with constant (and
> noisy) retries over the same areas. Both FDISK and FORMAT reported
> problems. 

> Then there was the dreadfully slow transfer of data from the logical
> drives. These had no logical problems and they would have been
> unaffected by the missing logical drive and the corrupt primary
> partition. I had also let the drive return to room temperature a
> number of times, and tried it in another machine with identical
> results.

> To all appearances there were serious problems with the drive, but
> somehow things magically fixed themselves, so what happened?

> All that I can think of is that perhaps the drive has a self healing
> facility and excluded sectors as being bad and then hid them
> (rewriting its internal bad track list) when Windows attempted to
> format it. The drive does use Smart technology although the BIOS does
> not support it.

> Anybody got any clues as to what happened? 

> Cheers

> Ian

> ------------------------------------------------
> To reply, remove "nospam" from my e-mail address.

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