Hard disks

Is there some new bug (not computer virus) that’s eating hard disks? As some of you will know the weather-watch.com server disk corrupted itself last week.

This morning I’ve found my main home PC crashed overnight. On re-booting it I’ve got a SMART warning saying the hard disk is dying and I need to back it up/replace it immediately. Looks like a trip to PC World this evening for a new drive.

:frowning: :frowning: :frowning: :frowning: :frowning:

sometimes you get a bad drive, it happens. If it happens again then I definitely would check to see if any other component is faililng

the HDD in the third party server that held the data for one of my stats services on my websites crashed last week. They sent it to a recovery service but the data could not be recovered and apparently there was not a useful backup to restore the data - so 3 years of stats were lost and had to start from scratch again.

I made sure the stats site owner know how unhappy I was!!!

sometimes you get a bad drive, it happens. If it happens again then I definitely would check to see if any other component is faililng

The two drives aren’t related. This server is located in a secure hosting facility about 200 miles away. My local hard disk is about 12 inches away at the moment!

The server disk had been running at least 24*7 for around 9 months. I’m still not 100% certain it was a hardware problem, but the server is now running on a new drive, so if the problem comes back then it’s definitely not hardware related.

My PC disk is probably 12 months old and also runs 24*7. It’s defniitely a hardware problem because the SMART system is telling me it’s dying.

I’m used to hard drive failures, although the problem does seem to be gettnig worse as drives get cleverer. My first ever 20MB drive was still working when I retired it through old age and being way too small to do anything useful with.

I couldn’t even begin to think about using a data recovery service. We’ve used them a couple of times at work…so I know how expensive they are!

Chris, do you know what brands they were? I saw something a while ago about (IIRC) IBM (now Hitachi) continuing to ship a particular model of disk even though its field failure rate was off the chart.

Chris, do you know what brands they were? I saw something a while ago about (IIRC) IBM (now Hitachi) continuing to ship a particular model of disk even though its field failure rate was off the chart.

Server disk is ST340014A, which I guess makes it a Seagate. I’m not sure what the PC one is just yet…I’m in the middle of trying to clone it to a new disk.

My PC disk is a Maxtor. ISTR that smoe Maxtor disks have three year guarantees, so it will be interesting to see exactly how old the drive is when I eventually extract it.

Seems to have been IBM Deskstars and they had a head problem. Hopefully you can get a replacement for your Maxtor, although it may be better to buy a new, current technology one. I worked for a co in the drive business in one of my (many) former lives, as with sausage manufacture you may not want to know too much of what goes on :wink:

I’ve already bought my replacement drive. It’s a 120GB/7200/ATA133 Samsung for

IMHO this is a good one for Fat http://www.backtec.com/

Anyone running XP on a FAT partition should read the manuals and work out how to convert from FAT to NTFS ;-)
[http://www.digit-life.com/articles/ntfs/index3.html](http://www.digit-life.com/articles/ntfs/index3.html) [http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/05/02/0612242&mode=thread&tid=109](http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/05/02/0612242&mode=thread&tid=109) I PERSONALLY, have not noticed any performance differences between NTFS and FAT32, other than if win dies, you can't get anything saved from NTFS...

but I could be wrong :wink:

Are you using anything to keep these drives cooled?
If not, I suggest you look into it. It’s surprising how warm they get running 24/7, cooling them will help them last.
For a normal home usage…it’s not a must, but running them 24/7.
I have 2x80GB WD 8meg cache HD’s with one 80mm fan (for each drive) blowing air over em (the case I have is design for them), they are running 24/7. I’ve had them for over 18 months now.

Ugh…pronounced aaaaaarrrrrrggggggghhhhhh!

I don’t want to do that again. I’m nearly back to normal after my PC disk crash. About another 3 hours should have the system back almost as it was when the last 20GB or so is copied back into place.

I found out that disk partition copying utilities are fine…as long as you don’t have any dodgy sectors in the partition. The ones I could find bombed out when they saw the broken bits. I’ve ended up using a beta partition cloner and learning more about the way that XP loads up than I really wanted to.

Even though I managed to copy my C: drive files across to the new disk I somehow lost most of the recent MS security updates and the video driver. XP doesn’t look pretty in 4 colours at 800*600!

I knew there was a good reason why I always specified mirrored system disks and RAID5 data partition on the servers at work! I just wish I could afford such luxuries at home.

Wow! I have NEVER experienced a hard drive failure. I have one that runs 24/7 and its a 2 gig. It has to be 7 or 8 years old. Bought it when 2 gig was the biggest you could by. All of my PC’s run 24/7 so I guess I must be lucky.

I saw a posting on another group claiming good recovery results with NTFS Reader which is free from http://www.ntfs.com/products.htm

NTFS Reader looks like a useful utility to have on my XP boot CD, but from the description on the web site it doesn’t sound like it does what I needed to do, i.e. create a copy of as much of a partly corrupt partition into a new partition on a new disk.