Date: Mon, 11 Aug 2003 22:09:03 +0800 From: Raymond <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: [LIB] Now bad physical HDD blocks [EMAIL PROTECTED]
At 12:27 AM 11/08/2003 -0700, you wrote:
Date: Mon, 11 Aug 2003 07:22:57 +0000 From: "Matthew Hanson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Now bad physical HDD blocks [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Many thanks to David and Karen for their tips on file recovery... Seems my life has become a daily process of going from one calamity to the next.
Gee do I know that feeling ... heh ... there must be several Murphys in my computer ... and every now and again they decide to gang up on me.
Today while working on one of the partitions on a 46GB IBM Deskstar HDD in a desktop, the system locked up with the drive started making a series of scratchy clicks in the pattern of 4-4-3.
Yup been there done that, exact same problem - machine locks up with scratchy click noises then you start getting bad blocks. Yes I too have a pair of 75GXP's now which were the replacements when my initial pair of 75GXP's died (as in random bad clusters coming up, I knew for certain they'd died by running the DFT, see later). The curious thing is, the initial 2 drives have always been part of a RAID0 stripe set right from the day I pulled them out of their sealed wrappers ... when the whole set died, I tested both drives by themselves and both had died, I'm guessing at the same time ... looks like the cause must have been pretty non-random ... no prizes for guessing where I don't keep important data ... heh
I ran an old version of Norton Disk Doctor which found 4-5 bad blocks and marked them. But the partition was an extended logical D: at the end of the drive right after the C: primary partition, the only other partition on the drive.
OK I'm presuming that should read "But the partition that the bad blocks were found on was an extended logical D ..."? Otherwise, I'm somewhat lost ...
It took 6+ hours to scan and mark the approx. 6GB D: partition. I really needed that area of data to be a primary partition. So thinking DD had written the info on the bad blocks to a partition table somewhere, I ran Partition Magic (at this point having upgraded to 8.0) to convert the D: logical drive to a hidden primary drive for doing tests with various flavors of Win98.
*blink* *blink* OK I missed something ... why do you need it to be a hidden primary?
However after doing the conversion, and then attempting to restore a ghost image to the new primary partition, ghost failed about 3/4 of the way through the process complaining of problems writing to the drive.
Ya Ghost can be made to read from a dodgy drive but it'll almost always fall over when writing to a dodgy drive, it was really designed for recovering data and assisting in rollouts and the like in a corporate or mass-distribution sorta environment, in those environments, if a drive showed signs of going bust it'd get replaced immediately ...
I'm now running another 6+ hour surface scan with DD, and am wondering if I'll have better luck this time.
I'd run IBM's drive fitness tester (search for DFT on the IBM site). That'll take a while to run, I can't remember if that has a data destructive mode in it though (if it does and you can afford to lose the data there, run that as well). If that fails, it'll tell you if it is the dreaded 75GXP bug in which case the drives are pretty much a writeoff, the bad clusters will slowly keep increasing in number, taking random chunks of data with them (at least thats what happened in my experience) ...
Is there no way to retain information on just where bad blocks are living on HDDs for use later when deleting partitions, and configuring new ones? I've never had problems with physical problems of a HDD before.
Generally not if you're mucking around with partitions and almost always no when you're restoring images ...
PS: As I recall, there was a problem with these IBM DeskStar 75GXP drives. Wonder if IBM will replace it gratis 2+ years after the purchase.
Well the drives I got had 3 year factory warranties, I'm guessing that's standard with IBM drives of that era ... I ran the DFT, took screenshots (it's a "create boot floppy and reboot to run" sorta program, the screenshots were with a digicam) and showed them to the store I got the drives from, they sent the lot away, I twiddled my thumbs for 2 months before the replacements came. Good thing they shipped bigger drives back otherwise I would have complained! During this time customers in the US were getting over-the-counter replacements! Given that the 75GXP is long since discontinued, you might get lucky and get 120GXPs or better :-D
Good luck!
- Raymond
P.S. I remember hearing that IBM was getting sued over this bug a while back ... anyone know what came out of that?
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