At 11:40 18-02-02 +1000, Russell C. wrote: >Kevin Tarr wrote: > >>I have two seperate questions, the first may relate to Ronn's problems. >>1. Over the last year my niece and nephew have gone through four hard >>drives. These were name brand, WD, store bought hard drives. Two of the >>failures were instantanious, two built up over weeks until it was obvious >>that something was wrong. Is there any notices about hard drive failures? >>The real question: what do you experts do to look ahead for problems? I know >>I can't get teenagers to do any weekly checks, but could these problems been >>avoided? >You would have top assume something else is wrong here. Backups, RAID, >SMART etc are all available to protect your data in various ways, but none >of them is going to stop the hardware failure. I would be looking at >either the IDE controller (which these days means the whole motherboard), >or the power supply. Power supply is easiest (and cheapest) 'coz you can >simply swap them with another by removing 3 or 4 screws while you get a >repair store to test the output on both 12v and 5v lines of the original >unit. Any fluctuation is bad...
Of course, there's the small matter of disconnecting all the cables from the power supply to the various components, then reconnecting them properly and hoping all the connections are tight enough . . . And while we're on the subject, why do you have to buy a whole new $25 power supply when it's a 10� fuse that has blown? BT, DT . . . didn't get a T-shirt, though . . . -- Ronn! :)
