Effect of a bad HD on a good one.

[Pooped]

I have an 80GB HD that went bad. I bought a new one but still have the old one on my system, strictly as a slave for storage (it seems to be all right for that). Suddenly my new drive is getting squirrely--large lags in storage, cursor movements, etc, causing me to have to re-boot. Is it possible that a defective secondary drive is causing that, even though its not really used?

[Limerick]

Hi pooped,

I've never encountered that situation with all the hard drives that I've had through the years. What you could do is to temporarily take the old drive out of the picture. Then see how the machine runs with just the new drive. That should greatly narrow your search for the source of the problem.

Happy Computing!

Limerick

[SuperSparks]

Your interseting question prompted me to have a read of Upgrading & Repairing PC's on the matter, and I can certainly see a situation where faulty drive electronics might cause the other drive to be adversely affected, if I'm understanding thing right.

I'd definitely follow Limericks' advice on this one, disconnecting the suspect drive will certainly prove it one way or the other.

[Pooped]

I did remove the old drive, and things seemed to have calmed down. I noticed when I rebooted, it ran chkdsk--first on both drives, and then only on the old one [that was part of the problem--chkdsk would never complete on the bad drive].

Anyway, when it first happened last night, it ran OK after a re-boot, even with the old drive still in place. So I'll see if the problem stays gone with the old drive out, and let you know.

Thanks for the feedback.

[104456]

If you are continuing to use the defective drive I would suggest you boot with a startup disk [98/ME] and run the DOS version of scandisk.At least this way the bad sectors will be marked and may help prevent data loss from those sectors.
One other suggestion which may revive the drive for a while longer is to run the manufacturers low level format on the drive.

[Pooped]

But its an XP disk.

Besides, Scan disk will not complete on the bad drive. I tried booting to safe mode and it wouldn't do it. Scandisk does identify some bad sectors, but then it stalls about 75% in (which it takes about 90 minutes to get to), which of course means it runs again when I re-boot. Before I replaced it, the only problem was, once I cancelled out of Scandisk and booted, I couldn't get an internet connection. Otherwise it ran fine.

PS The problem with the new drive started after I installed the Norton personal Firewall, so if it still exists even with the old drive gone, I'll try deinstalling that and see.

[104456]

But its an XP disk

It doesnt matter as long as its FAT32 not NTFS.

The problem with running scandisk within windows is it gets locked up with other software running on the system and can get extreemly slow or stall altogether and is better run in safe mode than in normal windows.
This said running it from a boot disk will cause less interference from the installed software and the DOS version is different in some ways to the Scandisk installed within win XP/2K.
As I said the other option is a low level format of the drive to try and revive as much of the drive as possible.

One of the causes of it stopping [or apparantly stopping] at 75% is there may be a bad sector just there and it will be more evident if you watch the Dos version run through.
In the end you will just hate yourself if your only copy of a file gets written over a bad sector and becomes unrecoverrable.