[ILUG] OT-ish: hard disks + M$

[Liam Bedford]

On Mon, 30 Aug 1999, Paul Curtayne wrote:

> The disk is supposed to be almost new, it was fitted earlier this year
> by someone else. I don't know the brand, I won't be able to check for
> a little while, I'll let you know.
> 
> FWIW, the machine is a Compaq presario CDS 523 integrated base
> unit/monitor. The daisk is much newer than the machine.
Hmm.. there were problems originally with Seagate drives when UDMA came
out first, in that the disks couldn't deal with it and were getting slowly
corrupted. Wonder if the controller is just too old for the drive.
However, if a 2Gb drive has developed bad sectors in less than a year, it
should go straight back to the manufacturer. The second you start seeing
bac sectors, something is seriously wrong, becuase most IDE drives map out
a number of bad blocks before declaring then (AFAIK something like what
SCSI does). Does the drive have SMART, and if you can find the
manufacturer, then they nearly all have utilities on the web to check
drive's data integrity. However, I'm inclined to say it's a warranty job
(incidentally one of my Sun Ultra 5's in work died last Monday. The
Seagate 4.3 Gb IDE drive developed a stupid number of bad blocks, and the
SCSI card died... conincidence for the moment :()

Regards
L.
---
Liam Bedford							System Administrator
WBT Systems, Block 2, Harcourt Centre, Harcourt St.			01-4170153
18, Edenbrook Manor, Rathfarnham, Dublin 14				01-4950344