I just put in a Promise ATA controller. We’ll see how it goes. Spinrite showed no errors on the drive even before I did the repartitioning. It’s an older P4, so I told them if this doesn’t stay fixed this time then they need to buy a new/used computer. The time it takes me to offload all their data to a temp loc and put it back and re-install and on and on is killing me.
-- Mike Gill From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Lenny Bensman Sent: Tuesday, September 16, 2008 11:56 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: Harddrive question - MBR hosed part II - Again?! 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 ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
