Freak HD Failure

I had a HD failure on a new drive last night in one of my partitions that is bizarre at best. Before I start tearing the system apart looking for new problems, I'm going to ask around to see if there is something I may not know.

I'm using ASUS A7N8X Deluxe / Corsair DDR 2700 / Athlon 2600 and this shiny new Maxtor UATA133 160GB drive partitioned 5 ways. (3 are FAT32 to copy the drives from a drive I was replacing, 2 new ones were NTFS)

So I'm copying massive amounts of data to the NTFS drive, about 32GB total, and it goes fine, all the files are in tact on that drive as well as the other partitions, when I start up DC++ to start downloading a few files.

One file starts downloading and immediately stops. This file is being downloaded to the first partition on the new drive which is a 31GB FAT32 partition intended for big file storage before I can burn it to CD, and a bunch of MP3s. DC++ tells me the target directory is invalid or something similar so I go check it out in explorer.

My incomplete download directory is full of characters with gibberish names at this point and I can't delete the directory entry. Ook .. so as I'm working with the drive trying to see what the deal is, the MP3 directory catches the same bug, and eventually the root directory of completed downloads is nothing but gibberish. I reboot to check out the hardware monitor in the BIOS to make sure the settings are accurate there and they look fine to me.

When I reboot the volume label on the partition is gone and its just (Local Disk 4) or whatever. The whole drive is full of gibberish, so restart for a scan disk.

Well starting at cluster ~3700 its repairing lost cluster chains in every single cluster (I assume) on the drive. I went to sleep with it running to see what would happen and woke up 5 hours later to it still going and on about cluster 80000. So just restarted and formatted the drive, NTFS this time, and shut down the computer so I can look at it later. No physically bad clusters reported post-format though.

Other than this glitch, the system is running fine (its been going about a week) but the drive was put in earlier that day. Its the slave on the same IDE channel as a 40GB IBM deskstar which has been serving me reliably for a number of years.

What the hell would cause that kind of thing? I don't think its physical failure on the drive, its brand new and the other partitions appear fine at this time, but of course it is possible and only further testing later will reveal if this is a drive wide problem.

any hints of the click of death? strange clicking noises will do it.

btw, i suggest you replace your IDE ribbons just in case. it sounds like your file/directory structures got corrupted.

any hints of the click of death? strange clicking noises will do it.

btw, i suggest you replace your IDE ribbons just in case. it sounds like your file/directory structures got corrupted.
Drive sounds fine, other partitions seem functional. I received a drive once that was doing the click of death, so I would recognize that, but I'll make sure its not there again later.

I can replace the IDE ribbons easily, and I'll do that when I get home today and use the brand new one from the drive.

It's called over partitioning.

First, don't ever go over 4 partitions on a single drive, it isn't good, and multipartitioning drives slows it down to begin with.

Second, FAT32 and NTFS on the same drive is not recommended by the big dogs at MS, stick to one partition type, it causes cross allocation errors writing multiple FATS of different types to the same MFB on the drive.

Third, the files you had, are toast start finding them again to re-download after you re-setup your drive.

Sry

It's called over partitioning.

First, don't ever go over 4 partitions on a single drive, it isn't good, and multipartitioning drives slows it down to begin with.

Second, FAT32 and NTFS on the same drive is not recommended by the big dogs at MS, stick to one partition type, it causes cross allocation errors writing multiple FATS of different types to the same MFB on the drive.

Third, the files you had, are toast start finding them again to re-download after you re-setup your drive.

Sry

Ok well see the drive I am backing up with it is still in tact so I have copies of all the files. I was worried about having partitions that are too large in the beginning so I split it up. I will start over today when I get home and do 3 53GB or 4 40GB (is less better?)

It's called over partitioning.

First, don't ever go over 4 partitions on a single drive, it isn't good, and multipartitioning drives slows it down to begin with.

Second, FAT32 and NTFS on the same drive is not recommended by the big dogs at MS, stick to one partition type, it causes cross allocation errors writing multiple FATS of different types to the same MFB on the drive...

Sry

ehhh sorry but i call bs...

I've never heard of it, but I should have NTFS on those other partitions anyway. Is there something I can read with more info on setting this thing up right? I mean I thought I had a good grip on what I was doing, but I can't afford to have entire partitions fuck up randomly.

Why not just 2 80GB NTFS partitions?

if something goes wrong on one, that's 80 GB that could be wiped instead of my 30.

Whatever. :shrug:

if something goes wrong on your drive, it's probably a physical defect and it'll spread so fast it won't matter. if you're worried about data integrity, then mirror the drive.

/me waits for the inevitable "How do I do that?"...






:heart: Rayn

I can't afford another HD to mirror onto, but its good to know when the drive starts failing I'm screwed!

my hard drive makes weird clicks but only when the computer is booting up. is it also on the verge of death?