Had it happen to me on the same machine with two different drives. First drive that was in the system for couple of years suddenly died with the same symptoms as you described. Thought it was the drive itself, had it recovered, and put a brand new drive into the system. 2-3 weeks later same issue came up with the new drive.
I'm suspecting a bad disk controller or likely bad IO controller on mobo that is/was acting up. No longer using that machine... Recovery of the drive showed that there were several bad writes to the drive. MBR & MFT got badly damaged. Got it recovered but such that out of 80G drive the company pulled out 120G worth of data (drive was not compressed). Needless to say I had to comb through it b/c files were duplicated and even 'penticated' (five copies ;) ) with only one copy being good one. I'd suspect mobo/controllers as culprits. If you have another box, throw the drive in there (backup data first, of course), and give it a strenuous test with SpinRite and just about any other software you can find. If it doesn't fail, then some board/chip it is... Lenny On Mon, Sep 15, 2008 at 4:05 PM, Mike Gill <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>wrote: > My head espload… This is happening AGAIN. An RMA'd drive is in the > computer now. It seems very unlikely to be a problem with the machine that > is corrupting the MBR in a way that can't be fixed. But two drives failing > like this? What could be going on here?! > > > > Original Message: > > > > I have this one Seagate ATA drive that for the second time now has a > corrupt MBR. The evidence is booting the computer leads to a "disk read > error, press control alt del to restart." I can boot to a BartPE disc and > see the contents of the drive OK, and a chkdsk shows no errors. I am > currently running the SeaTools extended test on the drive, which I did the > last time this happened, as well as running SpinRite at level 4 & 5. I have > done the fixboot and fixmbr from the recovery console as well. Nothing I do > will repair the damaged MBR. Fixmbr says the boot record is non-standard, > but it cannot repair it even though it says it did. I can run it over and > over again and it always says non-standard and that it was repaired. The > only way I was able to use this drive again from the first time this > happened was to repartition and reinstall the OS. > > > > I'm most likely going to RMA the drive, but I'm really curious as to what > is going on and why fixmbr can't fix it while repartitioning can. Is there > any other trick I'm missing? > > > > -- > Mike Gill > > > > > > ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
