From: Dermot Conner (dconner at domain tinet.ie)
Date: Tue 31 Aug 1999 - 13:24:10 IST
Hi,
Ok, here is my 0.02p It sounds to me like you might have marginal
cabling. Either a connector not fully inserted or a sick cable, or suchlike.
I have had disks in the past which were adequately connected t o detect on
post, would boot windows etc, but would throw up nasty bosds due to losing
the odd sector here.
What seems to happen is the disk goes on a head seek extravaganza
during scandisk, or some other high usage activity, and shake themselves
about a bit, as well as making lots of use of the IDE channel they are on.
Then, when the cable loses a connection on a pin or two, the HDD goes Eeek!,
Urgle, Thunk and writes gibberish to a little bit of disk before the IDE
connection recovers integrity. The big nasty here is that if the head
happens to be flying over a 'factory only' chunk of disk, like servo
information or z sectors, which are all over the place, it will write
garbage there which it has no way of fixing. (The servo information is used
to keep the heads on the straight and narrow when reading or writing, and is
written by special heads in the factory).
What makes me particularly suspicious it that most of your trouble
is at the end of the physical disk, which is a phenomenon that seems to go
with loose cabling. Dunno why. Steve Gibson I aint, but if you are in doubt,
I very strongly suggest removing the disk and trying it in a machine with a
known good IDE interface and cable. Also, you might like to check out
www.grc.com. They produce a product called SpinRite which I for one swear
by. It will give you a much better idea of the low level health of the disk
than anything else that I know.
Dermot
<snip>
>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.
>
>I ran Data Advisor from Ontrack on the disk, it includes a virus
>checker made by VET, and was passed clean. Incidentally, data Advisor
>failed to pass the quick test on the disk and choked, but it still
>booted!!!
>
>Paul
<snip>
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