HD Problem on 8RDA+

[linuxrulz]

My 60GB Maxtor HD is giving me trouble. These are the symptoms: I fail to play video files stored on the drive, media player will start playing the video and suddenly stop and say something like "no media found on drive". Then if I play the video again it will go past the part were it froze last time and randomly stop at some other point. During bootup WinXP keeps scanning the drive for errors, everytime finding new bad clusters. Norton Disk Doctor reveals nothing. Defragmentation of the drive is extremely slow.

The following is the configuration on my system:

Athlon XP 1700+
Epox 8RDA+
SCSI RAID 0 array on Adaptec 2100s 2 x 17.2GB drives
-2 partitions: one FAT32 for Win98, one NTFS for WinXP
Maxtor 60GB IDE set as Primary Master - one FAT32 partition
ZIP 100MB set as Primary Slave
DVD-ROM --> Secondary Master
CD-RW --> Secondary Slave

Any ideas as to what can be done? Has anything similar happened to any of you? Should I consider RMA'ing the drive?

Are you sure that the drive is all right?
Enable HD Smart capability in bios (2. Menu at the bottom) and check in win with some tool like dtemp if the drive's SMART parameters are all right (if any of the lights isn't green but red its almost ceratin to be faulty)
Hope this helps.
If not, try testing the drive in another system, with another IDE cable.

[MiGGinZ]

See if the new version of POWERMAX is available on the maxtor.com website, its a program they reccomend to use before warranty replacement to thouroughly check the HDD.

[linuxrulz]

Originally Posted by jcool

Are you sure that the drive is all right?
Enable HD Smart capability in bios (2. Menu at the bottom) and check in win with some tool like dtemp if the drive's SMART parameters are all right (if any of the lights isn't green but red its almost ceratin to be faulty)
Hope this helps.
If not, try testing the drive in another system, with another IDE cable.

used DTemp like you suggested and the Reallocated sector count light comes off as red. Does this mean the drive is faulty?

[linuxrulz]

Originally Posted by MiGGinZ

See if the new version of POWERMAX is available on the maxtor.com website, its a program they reccomend to use before warranty replacement to thouroughly check the HDD.

There is still no powermax version for nvidia chipsets. Any other way of testing the drive?

[Aedan]

Originally Posted by linuxrulz

used DTemp like you suggested and the Reallocated sector count light comes off as red. Does this mean the drive is faulty?

The Reallocated sector count is the number of sectors that the drive has had to reallocate to it's spare sector pool. Basically, hard disks are manufacturered with spare sectors that cannot be accessed normally. If the hard disk notices that a previously good sector has gone bad, it maps one of the spare sectors into it's place.

This would suggest that either your drive has suffered contamination, or some part of the electronics are failing. The drive is going to get much worse fairly quickly. I'd recommend backing up the disk as soon as possible, and then get the drive replaced!!

Áedán