On Sun, 06 Jul 2008 15:43:03 +0100, Arfa Daily wrote:
> Here's one I've never had before. Earlier this week, my wife informed me
> that a business-related CD ROM that she uses regularly on my machine,
was
> failing to read. She was right. Further investigation revealed that the
> machine, a Dell, could no longer see my 250GB data drive either. This
> drive is a Seagate, and was replaced probably a little over a year ago,
> because its predecessor, which had been in there a long time, had begun
> dying with nasty noises and erratic reads. Both the CD ROM drive and the
> Seagate, are on IDE channel 1, in cable select format.
>
> My first suspicion was that something had happened to the mother board's
> IDE driver IC, but the Windoze diagnostic said that it was ok. Further
> checks disconnecting stuff, showed the problem to be the Seagate drive
> that was hanging up the channel 1 IDE bus. As soon as it was
disconnected,
> the CD ROM drive came back on line.
>
> I got a new 320GB drive from Maplin's for 49 quid (how good a deal is
that
> ?) and was able to restore its contents from the external backup drive
> that I have, and which does a backup automatically every night.
>
> I've never had a drive fail in this way before, problems usually being
> motor or bearing related. Anyone else had it ?
>
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 re****ted 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.
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