On Wed, 26 Dec 2001 at 23:22:39, Richard Zidlicky wrote:
(ref: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>)
>On Mon, Dec 24, 2001 at 08:47:21PM +0000, Bill Waugh wrote:
>> Al Feng wrote:
>> >
>> > Before you try anything drastic, you may want to try the drives in a
>> > different PC case ... your power supply may be dodgey and not putting out
>> > enough amperage -- a particularly plausible potential hazard with the
>> > trim/slim profile cases which have a 150 watt or smaller PS.
>> >
>> Thanks Al, I did try a different feed and changed the cable, the drive
>> powered up ok it just would not read.
>> I have now formatted the drive - how does the Q40 do it so fast?
>
>it doesn't do low-level format. Does the drive read ok now? If so
>than it was probably just one bad sector or a damaged filesystem.
>
>It might be possible to tell appart HW failure and damaged filesystem
>failure by trying direct sector r/w, booting a linux kernel or plugging
>the HD into another computer.
A few years back, my dual boot PC (mainly Linux but occasionally W98)
had a dodgy HD.
The eventual problem emerged as a dead drive motor, but it was marginal
for a long time.
W98 died at the first sign of problems - blue screen saying cannot read
from drive C - and that was it. W98 never even started to load from
then on.
Under Linux, things continued apparently normally for a very long time.
The only sign of problems were the odd segmentation error, and, very
unusually, a system lockup.
On re-booting after the lockup, it ran fsck (of course), and reported
unresolvable errors.
However it presented me with the command line to type, and then started,
presumably as root, or single user.
I did what it said, and it successfully 'repaired' the HD, and told me
precisely which areas of HD were dead and which files I lost.
Staggeringly good. I allowed me to properly back-up everything on a
second HD. On the next boot the HD motor didn't start at all.
I run Linux and W98 side by side 24hr on two machines. Linux needs
rebooting maybe once every two months, and then only because it is
clearly getting short of memory. I bet there is a Linux task I can run
to help that! I am extraordinarily pleased if my W98 lasts a morning.
The W98 is on the 'better' modern hardware.
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