Hard Drive Diagnostics and Issues

[Psykoikonov]

I am almost certain not positive but close that Hitachi and IBM are synonymous, meaning that IBM's utility should most likely work with your Hitachi drive.

Hitachi bought IBM's harddrive business about a year ago (I think). IBM doesn't make hdd anymore, anything to do with them should be directed to Hitachi (all the Deskstars are now their problem LOL, luckily most of the warranties are expired). Ohh...and yes Hitachi tools are the same as IBM

 

[*spazzed*]

i noticed that when my IBM's were about to blow up, that they'd be quite noisy...
i had 3 go bad on me within a couple of weeks

thankfully i had waranty on them, and when they got maxtors in, i traded my crap IBM for a cheaper maxtor(yeah, i aaactually got 25 bucks back) and its been about 2 years and this maxtor runs like the day i got it

 

[Jackywebdesign]

I know these tools are supposed to HELP, but WD's data lifeguard KILLED my drive... my WD600AB was misbehaving and windows had the "your HDD might have bad sectors" msg come up. (It had said "can't write to drive C:" the day or 2 before) I booted into windows and ran WD data lifeguard. It ran fine and did find some bad sectors. I then ran the verification test to make sure, and it stopped at something like 37% and hard froze my comp. I rebooted, and got the dreaded "disk boot failure" msg... what are my chances of it only killing the MBR? I want my 50 gigs of data back....2 yrs of my life on there w/ occasional backups, not complete by a long shot... you think WD would at least apologize for it? (the drive still has .5 yr warranty, I like 3 yr warranties back then)

 

[megaman1]

i have downloaded this prog

Maxtor and Quantum

as i have a maxtor drive, & i have found out you need a floppy diskett to run the prog. when i brought i my computer from CCLCOMPUTERS i did not order a floppy drive. may i ask if there is another why i can run the prog please.

 

[SpyderMatrix]

whats this about putting a driver in the refrigerator

 

[stool]

I've never done it but many have. Placing the drive in the freezer for a time has allowed data recovery

 

[dicecca112]

megaman1 you may be able to run it from a cd, I won't see why that wouldn't work

 

[Ice Czar]

Ultimate Boot CD

 

[Dukeman]

More on Diags

After reading some of these posts I'd like to add my two cents. These diagnostics are helpful because S.M.A.R.T is not really that helpful. SMART can only tell you if a drive is experiencing a condition thay MAY result in failure EVENTUALLY. The diagnostics tell you if the drive failing now, but they can also tell you if the drive is not performing well.

Most conditions that really result in near-future drive failure will affect the drive's performance prior to failure and may not trip SMART. Write failures, read failures, servo failures will result in retries on the drive regardless of why the failures are occuring.

Most consumer diags do not show much detail on retries (drives can try up to 256 times with various ECC algorithms to try to get data off of a sector) but they may show number of bad sectors. Bad sectors in small groups close together generally indicate media damage. A few bad sectors scattered around indicate "normal" operation since bad sectors can occur from weak writes caused by heat, vibration and non-damaging operational shock. A lot of bad sectors scattered around generally indicates a bad environmental condtion like heat or drive failure.

The best way to use the diagnostics is to run a long or full drive self test and time it. On most makers drives it should take 1 minute per GB. If it takes considerably longer then the drive is probably experiencing a high number of retries. Besides, there should be no reason that a drive's self test take longer than specified. Usually the time self test should take is available in the drive's manual.

SMART Issues - The self test is part of the SMART specification. If the MB BIOS is set to disable SMART then some diagnostics may not be able to access it as the MB sets the drive SMART support to OFF. Some of the DOS tools force SMART on to run it's diagnostic when running the DOS version.

Bad Sectors - Finally, if you have a few bad sectors and just want to reallocate or re-write them you can use SeaTools Desktop (DOS) version 3.0 or IBM/Hitachi DFT. Both tools log sectors and their associated files and then ask the user if they want to try to re-write the sector. The data is forever lost once it is re-written. If you want to try to recover the data then check with a data recovery house. Some companies like Ontrack also offer software like EasyRecovery for file recovery, even if the partition table is corrupted.

Hope this is helpful.

 

[AudiMan]

This sticky saved me quite a bit of time.

 

[David]

Hard drive not showing up as big as it should be? Read this.

Recently a lot of people have been asking why their drive does not appear to have as much space as it was advertised as having. This can often mean drives are showing up a few gigabytes smaller than advertised. There are two possible reasons for this.

1) Manufacturers say "Gigabyte" when they mean 1,000,000,000 (10^9) bytes. When your operating system says "Gigabytes" it means 1,073,741,824 (2^30) bytes. This means in your OS the drive appears smaller.

For example, Samsung 120GB hard drive = 120,000,000,000 bytes.
120,000,000,000 bytes = 111.76 Gigabytes, 8GB less than advertised.


2) Windows XP, without Service Pack 1 or a suitable modification, will not see more than 137GB on one drive. If your drive is more than 137GB in size and is showing as 137GB then this is probably your problem. This is a limitation in Windows XP that is fixed in service pack 1.

To fix this problem:
See this article

From the linked article:

Windows XP SP1 includes 48-bit LBA support for ATAPI disk drives. With this support, you can use hard disks that are larger than the current 137 GB limit. By default, support is enabled in SP1. To determine if you are running SP1, right-click My Computer and then click Properties. On the General tab, Service Pack 1 will be listed under "System."

And if you dont want to install SP1:

You'll need to enable "Large Drive Support" by editing the Registry. Expand the following branch...

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE | SYSTEM | CurrentControlSet | Services | atapi | Parameters

In the RH pane, you'll need to add a new DWORD called...

EnableBigLba...with a DWORD Value of 1

Note: If you have installed Windows XP which has only seen a 137GB drive, created a 137GB partition and installed windows in that partition, you will need to create a new partition to use the newly available space.
For example, you have a 200GB drive. You created a 137GB partition and installed WindowsXP on it. You apply the fix/install SP1. To use the extra space you now have made available, go to Control Panel -> Admin Tools -> Computer Management -> Storage -> Disk Management section, and create a partition in the space now available.

 

[Sjaak]

ive had alot of people asking me and other pc guys what was wrong...i now have a simple linky to send them thanks

 

[Restorer]

There are limitations in Linux, and I would suspect they exist in Windows as well, where some chipsets simply cannot address anything past 137GB, even with software solutions. In my case, it is an ALi chipset revision 196 - LBA48 simply can't be used on anything earlier than revision 197, either because it causes problems (corruption etc.) and has to be disabled, or because it can't technically work.

 

[[aXe]]

For example, Samsung 120GB hard drive = 120,000,000,000 bytes.
120,000,000,000 bytes = 11.76 Gigabytes, 8GB less than advertised.

Sorry, but if I buy a 120Gig drive, and it formats to 11.76Gig, that's just not acceptable. A bit more than an 8Gig loss

hehe. I know, it's not nice to make fun of peoples' typos, sorry

 

[David]

Sorry, but if I buy a 120Gig drive, and it formats to 11.76Gig, that's just not acceptable. A bit more than an 8Gig loss

hehe. I know, it's not nice to make fun of peoples' typos, sorry

Lol, thanks for pointing it out

 

[ProBoner]

I have an 80gig that thinks its a 40gig... it only happened after I screwed something up and got that old "ntldr not found" or whatever... I think it was because I set too drives as masters or slaves and set them on the same cable... regardless, is there something that will allow me to format back to 80gig? for some reason I can't even set the #of cyl/sec/etc manually in the bios

 

[Grov]

I read the article and checked the number thing by searching, and it was lower than it said. So i installed the fix from Microsoft, re-booted, and it's still the same, i also have SP1.

It's been like this for months????

 

[[aXe]]

How big did you believe your hard drive to be, and how big is it showing you?

 

[Grov]

should be 160gig, showing as 127 (137).

But if i go into partition magic, it shows as 149.

I did make a 10gig partition, but never used it, found it whatever, i had a problem, somet went wrong a while ago, long story.

 

[[aXe]]

Yeah, some bios's won't recognise higher than 137Gig, and some operating systems need to be patched... Apparently it's fixed in XP with SP2 (maybe SP1, I dunno, don't use XP or drives over 137Gig).

If Part Magic recognizes the full size, I'd say your bios is fine, so it's gonna be an OS issue.