intermittent hard drive failure

[jstutman]

hello all. today is not a good day. i wake up and relize "hey no music" turn monitor on and notice its blank. no response, so i reboot and disk error, insert system disk. so i plug up my other hdd works. well this evening i plug the one that failed back up. it works.

1 hr later, slows down alot. then it locks up win xp says page_error_fault shutting down. i was like weird. go to reboot. again no disk drive insert system disk. is this signs of a possible hdd failure? any way to save it? i dont have a floppy so i cant run the diagnostics. the hard drive is not in my sig no more. its a 60 gig western digital 7200. i looked on wd site to see if the warranty is still valid. it says invalid serial number..... weird again.

please help with whatever info you can tell me.

 

[RPM_Computing]

Boot to a windows cd rom with the 60 gb drive attatched and run utilities from the windows dir on the cd rom. Back up the contents through DOS to the second drive if you are still able to get it to work. If you can backup, fdisk the drive then format and load windows. Could just be a virus or something software related. If the drive is cooked I would sudgest contacting western digital directly or return it to the place of purchase for an exchange or get them to RMA it to WD for replacement.

 

[stool]

You overclocked at all?

 

[jstutman]

ok sounds good. ill do all of that. except what is fdisk? also to the overclocked question, yes im overclocked at 160 fsb. no multiplier adjustment.

 

[RPM_Computing]

Fdisk is a utility for setting up your hard drive from the factory, basically it prepairs the disk to be used.

1.) When you are booted to the cd rom you will change directory to the win9x dir, when you are in there type "fdisk" withought the quotes, enable large disk capacity "y", delete the partition. Escape from fdisk, shut down the system and let it rest for about ten seconds before powering up.

2.) Load to the win cd rom again, use fdisk to create a partition, should be option 1 and make it active, esc from fdisk when the process is complete and shut down, let rest again.

3.) Load to the win cd, format the drive.

4.) Run scandisk when the format is complete, it is located in the win 9x dir on the cd rom, perform a surface scan just to make sure there are no bad sectors on the disk surface.

5.) If everything checks out ok load windows on the drive.

I hope this helps and good luck!

Print this out in case you need reference.

 

[RPM_Computing]

P.S.

Clock the system back to defaults when performing these tasks and during the install of windows. Clock it up after everything has loaded ok.

 

[jstutman]

would everything still be the same if using win_2k? i have win xp pro installed disk in not with me. i will check on that. one other question, is this possible..... 1 hdd=(OS-win 2k) 2x hdd=(raid 0+1) basically 3 hdds 2 on raid are for games and etc. while the other is my os to keep from slowing down my raid.

 

[stool]

Too high an overclock can cayse these problems. As RMS said try backing off your overclock to see if everything stabilizes.

 

[montecarlo]

The problem is most likely with your FSB overclock. At 160 MHz with a 4x divider you are running everything 20% over spec. Hard disks in particular are sensitive to overclocking the bus speed, and as you have it set up I am surprised that it hasn't given you any problems until now.

If there is something wrong with the drive, though, most likely it is still under warranty. All WD drives until recently had a 3-year warranty, and I doubt your drive is older than that, at 60 GB / 7200 RPM. If you can pull the drive and look at the label, it will most likely have a manufacture date somewhere so you can verify this.

Finally, your RAID question. With 2K or XP you can set things up as you described. It would only make performance sense if you have the hardware RAID option on the A7V333 (I am assuming you do). You would put your boot drive as the master on the first IDE channel, and the two identical drives on each channel of the RAID controller. (The CD/DVD drive should be placed on its own on the second IDE channel, and not as the slave on the first IDE channel.) That way (in theory) there should be no arbitration conflicts between the devices, as they are all on separate channels, and you should get the best performance.