Strange Hard Drive Problem

[stduc]

I have recently been having serious hard disk problems that I have mostly resolved. The trouble started when a different disk went bad and crashed my machine. Somehow it did something to another disk, so now I am left with the following situation.

I have two identical drives. I now wish to re-format them and restore their contacts from backup. Whilst one drive is fine and passes all SpinRites tests, etc. the other, causes my PC to pause for about two minutes after POST and before Windows starts to boot. I can then initialise this disk and format it, but, then SpinRite does not see the disk as having a valid partition table!.

Does anyone have any ideas how to restore this disk to full health. It passes Hitachi's DFT program's test with flying colours, although as usual the boot up process is much slower for this disk than the other disks. Unfortunately these disks are out of warranty.

When testing I have used the same IDE port and the same cable, one drive at a time and always configured as a Master disk.

The disks in question are. IBM (Hitatchi) Deskstars, Model :- IC35L120AVV207-0 Capacity 123.5Gb Type ATA/IDE

Any thoughts/solutions would be much appreciated.

 

[edfair]

You might try a zero fill utility. There may be one with the diagnostic disk. That sometimes will resolve this type of problem. It will force you to re-partition and re-format the drive.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[stduc]

I already tried that using Hitachi's DFT utility. It made no difference. I am beginning to think that the drives electronics are 'broken' in some odd way!

 

[edfair]

Suspect that you are right. I've see it several times, but not on that particular model.
If they are truly identical you could swap boards and get an idea of the problem, but you would also be at risk of having 2 broken drives.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[stduc]

Apparantly the on board NVRAM can get corrupted. So may be this is what happened? As XP sees the disk I can use it, but not usefully as reading/writing consume 100% CPU and the data rate is very slow! I think I'll just do a backup to it one night - it will probably take that long! Then remove it from my system and loose it in a drawer somewhere - like you do.