2 Hard Drives fail within a week

panzerkwpanzerkw New York City
edited October 2003 in Hardware
Both drives have been Western Digital drives of the 80GB 8MB cache type. Now they are dead pretty much. All I have left is a IBM Deskstar and who knows how long that one will last.

The first disk was on this system:

KX7-333R
T-bred B 2100

It was mildly overclocked. The disk clicked to death, and so I bought some new system gust and a new hard disk.

2nd Disk

Abit Nf7-S
Baton 2500
Mildly overclocked

I restarted my system, but it returned an error that hal.dll was corrupted and that I needed to copy it over. I tried using the recovery console to do this, but I can only access the root directory of the disk. If I try to go into any other directories on the command prompt, it says access is denied.

So I installed windows XP on the 3rd disk I have, a 60GB IBM deskstar which has worked just fine for over a year. And now I have two of the "latest" hard disks inoperative. What software can I use to try and restore them?

I connected Disk 2, booted windows from Disk 3, and tried to access Disk 2. Again, I can access the root directory, but if I try to open any other directories, it tells me the disk isn't formatted...

These failing discs have been ruinous for me and I don't know how much more I can take. One thing is for certain, I'm done with overclocking.

Comments

  • ThraxThrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian
    edited October 2003
    Overclocking didn't make your disks go bad. Don't point to topics that don't relate as the cause.

    On the KX7-333R, the HDD would just get a corrupted sector (Repairable) before the entire disk went bad. Additionally, the disk wouldn't even go bad. Too high an overclock and the drive just wouldn't be readable until you put the bus back down.

    With the NF7-S, it has a locked PCI bus. The PCI bus links directly to the IDE bus. No matter how much you overclocked, the IDE bus would never budge a single MHz. Your disk would be operating within 100%-to-spec parameters.

    I can give you some tools over AIM that would allow you to perform data recovery, but as of right now: Do not try to access those disks again. Do not even have them plugged in and linked to the system. If it's clicking you might have bad HDD arms, which means you can be putting nice scratches in the disk.
  • panzerkwpanzerkw New York City
    edited October 2003
    Alright I'll try contacting you over AIM. I mentioned the overclocking because it was the only thing I could think of that could be causing these disks to fail in the first place.
  • panzerkwpanzerkw New York City
    edited October 2003
    Disconnected Drive 2, made sure disk 3 was set to MASTER, booted up...

    system says DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT BOOT DISK

    Went back to original config and it's working again. When the machine boots up, it gives me a choice between the windows installation on the bad disk and the good disk. Bad disk fails with hal.dll corrupted error, good disk boots normally.
  • Straight_ManStraight_Man Geeky, in my own way Naples, FL Icrontian
    edited October 2003
    Not to interfere, but each XP install is likely to put its BOOT sector on whatever is master on primary cable regardless of whether the O\S itself is able to be put there, so you could have an O\S on disk three and an XP boot sector on disk two.

    IF and only IF the tools Thrax sends do NOT help you, the Recovery Console has a tool called CHKDSK on it, right on an XP Pro install CD.

    To access this tool, you can do this:

    Boot from CD, with XP Pro CD in place.
    Type R at the options screen to choose to install or go into recovery console-- you want the recovery console:

    Command Syntax is:

    CHKDSK C: /R
    if your XP Drive with problems is in the Primary Master HD and on first partition of same.

    NOTE: Western Digital has a downloadable floppy disk maker for WD drives. It is in support area on Western Digital's website
    http://www.westerndigital.com/
    and you can click on the support link, then choose downloads, adn get the archive. When you have it, if you have another Windows box, you can run the archive like a program WITH a BLANK floppy in the Floppy drive and then it will happily make a floppy bootable disk.

    The disk is floppy boot, SHOULD be write protected if you have ANY idea there might be viruses on HD, and there are both viruses that kill HDs and viruses that mess with HD data including system data, but by running this floppy write protected you can protect the Lifeguard utils from being virused and malfunctioning. You can just tell it OK when it says it cannot save a log.

    What you can run in diagnostics are several checkers, and these ARE essentially licensed Kroll Ontrack disk Diags specificly tuned further by WD for WD Hard Drives. Fast one is a quick check of controller on HD and its SMART status. Long one is a data integrity and HD data media surface checker, and errors from either will result in a WD RMA if they are under warranty on ANY WD HD that gives errors.

    I have not found an IBM\Hitachi or IBM\Fujitsu drive validator, but a full Ontrack program set can check those also-- this last is NOT cheap.

    With these last, you can at least see if this is truely the HD itself or a data corruption problem, and CHKDSK can sometimes fix things if other tools do not mess things up more than they help.

    I suspect creepingly cumulative data errors (right, Thrax) or viruses, and sometimes OCing with a lack of having all things in box easily OCable to same degree can cause data corruption big time (shouldn't, but HAS on boxes I have worked on-- what happens is essentially drive can end up slower than the IDE control circuitry expects given OCing of timing (BUS base rates) and then the mobo hardware reports false things to an O\S, O\S acts on false info, and some things soemtimes do not get written or O\S hangs in mid-write and part of file never gets sent).

    John, wishing you good luck with this.
  • panzerkwpanzerkw New York City
    edited October 2003
    I did a CHKDSK on the bad drive, and it reports that there are some irrecoverable erros on the disk. I'll have to stop by the WD site and try out those other tools if Thrax's don't work.
  • MancabusMancabus Charlottesville, VA
    edited October 2003
    I've gotten the hal.dll error before, but I did a repair install, and didn't fool with the recovery console, and that fixed it.

    I've seen this invoked two ways.

    One: Choose repair install of Windows XP after booting to CD, but don't do it via console or ASR.

    Two: Choose install new copy of XP, but then it will ask if you want to do a repair install instead, it may be buried after a couple screens though I can't remember.
  • ThraxThrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian
    edited October 2003
    My tools will be data recovery on the premise that they really are bad. I can't fix anything.
  • panzerkwpanzerkw New York City
    edited October 2003
    unfortunaltely they didn't work. :(

    Keep getting I/O errors throughout the scan of the disk. Eventually the tool would just lock up completely after skipping a few bad sectors.

    What else can I try?
  • panzerkwpanzerkw New York City
    edited October 2003
    My last operative hard disk isn't doing too well either. Every restart is a 50/50 chance that it'll see the disk and boot up. When it doesn't see it, it clicks like mad. When it does. it just clicks once and continues on.

    If this disk goes down (it'll be the 5th hard disk to die on me this year) I think I'm going to give up on any productive computing for a few months, because I'll simply lose everything I have inevitably.
  • LIQuidLIQuid Raleigh, NC
    edited October 2003
    RMA!
  • panzerkwpanzerkw New York City
    edited October 2003
    That won't save my data though.
Sign In or Register to comment.