Odd hard drive problem

[PCSolutions]

My neighbor has an AMD K6 533 motherboard (not sure of the make) that I am having an unusual problem with
He has 98 SE on it
32 megs ram
SiS 530 integrated video
CM 18737 sound
Lucent winmodem

The HD was a Fujitsu 6.4 that had developed bad sectors. A few weeks later it developed more & we couldnt get the cdrom tray to open
So I replaced the cd with a Mitsumi 48x & the HD with a Western Digital 20 gig, formatted & loaded everythng fresh
Basically all he uses it for is email

About a week back he said that he was getting a general failure error reading drive C on startup. I downloaded the latest WD DiskTools. It found a problem & fixed it. Did not mark any bad sectors. Scandisk found some lost clusters that required me to overlay windows. I thought I was done

A few days later this happened again. The Wd tools fixed it. The thoruough test reports the drive fine. No bad sectors
I noticed that the volume control and AV wasnt loading in the systray. Clicking on the show volume control in taskbar checkbox in multimedia did nothing. Scandisk found and fixed some lost clusters again. SFC didnt work at all. So I overlayed 98 again & all has been fine for a few days.

What could be causing this? My first inclination is to say power. He does not have it plugged into a surge supressor. I advised him to get one. We have had some bad storms but not outages.

Maybe flaky IDE cable? The connections are good. I checked that
Maybe controller on the motherboard?

Any thoughts?

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Keep it simple!

[This message has been edited by PCSolutions (edited 04-16-2001).]

[DrMDJ]

PC,

Except in the one case where there was a failure at startup, you don't say whether the errors are only showing/surfacing when scandisk is run, or during use (when the reading/writing is happening). If only when scandisk is run that would indeed be odd.

It almost does sound like a cable problem (intermittent). Possibly the IDE cable, but also maybe the power cable. A damaged wire, a so-so connection at a pin, etc.

Another possibility is swings in the power getting the drive(s). Either because of a problem in the PS, or because of swings in voltage going to the PS (ie. brown-outs). Of coarse the swings would have to be happening during disk activity for it to manifest itself in bad writes.

One other thought I'll just throw out... Forgetting about the old drive, is the new one using a disk overlay. The direction I'd be going here is that there is some sort of translation issue/problem that appears only when certain areas (cyls) are written/read on the disk. This may be a long shot, but...

Can you force the problem to happen? What if you run, say, some repetative benchmark type program that hammers away at the disk?


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[This message has been edited by DrMDJ (edited 04-16-2001).]

[PCSolutions]

So far this has occured twice. Both on bootup and both times with General Failure Error Reading Drive C Abort Retry Fail. This message always bodes ill

If I boot off of the Western Digital DiskTools and run the standard test it finds a problem and fixes it. Then if I follow that with the thorough test it tests fine. This does hammer away at the hard drive and is more effective than scandisk with the thorough option selected. I always follow this up by running the standard scandisk & it finds lost clusters. Some files get scrambled in windows which has always necessitated me to overlay it and fix a few other minor things. Neither the WD tools or scandisk report any bad sectors

There is no drive overlay program installed. The shop that sold it to him used what appears to be a new motherboard but cobbled it together with used parts. Probably using what they had on hand. I didnt pull the board to check the build date. Nor do I have the model#. I think its an ASUS or TopGun

I think that the old hard drive was just going bad. Fujitsu's have a pretty high failure rate

When I replaced the hard drive I did not change the cable and was thingking along those lines too. Also it could be unstable power or brown outs. We have had some pretty bad storms recently but both times this occured was weeks before the storms

I rather doubt that this is a controller problem but anything is possible


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Keep it simple!