Unusual HDD fault

nIGHTmAYOR said:

ok here is something i suggest you try since you have spare machines and hard drives , would you bother running HDD Re-generator on all disks showing allocated sectors (might take a day or two to complete) then test them again ?

The drive in post #1 that started this thread seemed unable to respond to the bios and identify itself as a drive, thus hanging any system it was connected to at boot. I suspect the internal control electronics had got itself stuck in a disallowed state. If so, there's probably little the HDD Regenerator can do for it. As that drive has spontaneously 'cured' itself I've returned it to its machine and am using it daily to see if it will fail again.

The second drive had been very slow to boot at times and as soon as I discovered the reallocated sector count I realised why. The number of reallocated sectors was growing with use, so it was genuinely failing. That one has been replaced with an SSD now and is currently sitting idle in a usb drive caddy, so it is available to test. I'll give it a go...

...please do not bother debate that this program has bad reviews or being slandered a fake on some forums , just give it a go .

Actually I have run such a program from a bootable CD (it may well have been that one, looks familiar) back in the days of IDE drives and XP machines so I know they can work. Back then it completely cured an IDE drive that was regularly developing bad blocks.

Bree said:

The drive in post #1 that started this thread seemed unable to respond to the bios and identify itself as a drive, thus hanging any system it was connected to at boot. I suspect the internal control electronics had got itself stuck in a disallowed state. If so, there's probably little the HDD Regenerator can do for it.

so it never occurred to you it has managed to develop a bad sector early in drive in master boot record area and took its time to read the content in slow mode before relocating it to a new sector and during this period the bios couldn't access system boot because the entire boot record was locked for processing ? this can be confirmed upon using HDD Regenerator , it may reveal it right away . is more reasonable in thinking than believing the HDD board healed itself.

Cheers

nIGHTmAYOR said:

so it never occurred to you it has managed to develop a bad sector early in drive in master boot record area and took its time to read the content in slow mode before relocating it to a new sector and during this period the bios couldn't access system boot because the entire boot record was locked for processing ? this can be confirmed upon using HDD Regenerator , it may reveal it right away . is more reasonable in thinking than believing the HDD board healed itself.

Two things. First, your scenario is unlikely as there were no new reallocated or pending sectors. It has just the one reallocated sector that had been there (without problems) for the past two years.


But second and more pertinent - I have now run HDD Regenerator on it and it found nothing to repair. So an electronic glitch still has to be my best guess.

As I said, I have used HDD Regenerator before and found it to be effective, so I wasn't averse to trying it. I just preferred to keep using the machine normally to see if it would fail again.

BTW, I have just dug out my old bootable CD and confirmed that it was version 1.71 that repaired my old IDE HDD back in the day.

Cheers, it was a good idea, but didn't solve the mystery

Bree said:

HAL 9000 said:
Yes, it's puzzling. I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like this before. I would recommend that we put the unit back in operation and let it fail. It should then be a simple matter to track down the cause. We can certainly afford to be out of communication for the short time it will take to replace it.

Currently the original drive is back in the laptop, I'm not sure I trust it now but at least I have a working clone should it fail again.

Postscript: it's now three months since I posted that. The HDD has performed faultlessly, clocking up a further 1,030 'Power On Hours'. I'm beginning to trust it...

Bree said:

Postscript: it's now three months since I posted that. The HDD has performed faultlessly, clocking up a further 1,030 'Power On Hours'. I'm beginning to trust it...

Nearly a year later (and the power on hours now at 27,985) the problem drive has been 100% reliable.

I'm determined to keep (ab)using this HDD until I grind it into the ground, but at over three years of active use it's proving remarkably hard to kill