MTM2.com

So I was cruising along and everything was fine. Then the comp started rebooting spontaneously. The occurrences were random. And somewhere along the way the user profile got deleted. I created a new one, ran chkdsk and all seemed fine.

Not satisfied, reboots usually mean deeper problems, I ran AVG which said there was a virus. I let it do it's thing. Next thing I know, I couldn't copy files. The message said the directory was corrupt. I had backups, so I just worked in a differenet location. Then another spontaneous reboot. I figured, let's reinstall windows. But I get this message. Drive is corrupted and canoot be repaired.
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I used a utility to delete the partitions, and fdisk to create new ones. Then, windows installer said.... the partitions created with fdisk were not there, and the old original configuration still remained. I tried partitioning within the installer but nothing would change. And finally, the installer said... drive can't be formatted, might be damaged.
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So, never one to say die, or tilt at windmills, I let windows have it's way. And viola, win xp pro installed and appears to be working.

I have no idea where to look for the problem, let along find solutions. Anybody ever see anything like that before? Obviously if it's the drive, then a new one will clear everything up. But how can it be working if it's no good?

I think you need more reliable storage. RAID perhaps?

http://ohlssonvox.8k.com/fdd_raid.htm

As cheap as storage is nowadays (you can get 250gigs for <$100) I wouldnt take any chances on it. It might keep working for years but it could go belly up tomorrow, if it was me I would replace it as soon as possible.

For that matter it is me, I had a drive fail this week with a bad sector. I was unlucky and it must of been a part of the drive where the directory structure was stored because I lost nearly everything on the drive. (I had everything except a few recent wallpaper downloads backed up so I didnt lose much) I was able to "block" off the bad sector and reformat but I am not going to use it again since it could die anytime. Gonna order me a replacement the first of next month to be safe.

PS Anyone want to buy a 120gig hard drive cheap?

<table cellspacing="1" cellpadding="3" border="0"><tr><td class="quote"> It might keep working for years but it could go belly up tomorrow </td></tr></table>
Yeah, or the day after that. Looks like I have to visit the comp shops.

This's a good reliable inexpensive resource.

http://www.bixnet.com

You guys forget where I live....


Anyway, here's an update.

A couple months/years ago I downloaded a utility from the maxtor site that does partitioning and whatnot. I've been switching back and forth between windows and linux and the disk structures are very different, not to mention pretty much incompatible as far as microsoft is concerned. In fact, so bad is it, that after you install a non ms operating system, windows will then tell you that your drive is no good anymore. But that's not true. However, I also have a dos level partition program that boots from a floppy that's about as fast and easy as anything could be. This time, though, while it would delete the old partitions, it did not solve the problem. So, while scrounging around looking for things to try, I found the old maxtor program. It had a feature that completely re-wrote the major boot record for the drive. And now I was able to partition it in a more sensible way, and it's been working fine ever since. About ten days.

Okay, but do I really want to trust a drive that's given some pretty shakey problems. Answer: no, not really. So, I went out and picked up a new drive. However, rather than toss the old drive, which appears to be working fine, I just added the second drive... since there was room for it. Now, the new drive bursts the 137 gigabyte threshold for large drives, so I thought I'd check out the maxtor site to see what updates they've given their program and discovered they've been very busy. They divided their utility into two separate programs, one of them now boots from a cd, and can even run from within windows.

I don't know if the old drive is 'really' okay or not, but it looks to me that whatever went wrong with it has been cured by maxtor's utility. And even if that's not true, the new drive will serve to hold the more valuable data. But from where I'm sitting, the more I look at it the more it seems this was caused by or related to windows, and that it took non-windows programming to fix it.

If/when the old drive gives it up, I'll post back so we can get an idea of time frames.

http://www.bixnet.com/eideharddrive.html
WD 200GB 7200RPM ATA100 IDE Hard Drive
Regular price: $199.00
Sale price: 149.95

By the time we add exchange and shipping, that gets higher still. I got the oem maxtor equivalent for 105. If I was in the neighborhood, on the other hand,.....