Meat Plow wrote:

Eeyore wrote:

Never seen this before.

A HDD of mine (IBM Deskstar 20GB IC35L020AVER07-0) 'died' when I restarted
Windows (XP btw FWIW). Windows shut down OK seemingly but wouldn't restart.

It totally 'locked up' the PC with no error message. Never seen anything quite
like that before so it took me a little while to pinpoint it. The BIOS found the
drive OK btw.

Anyway, I got things sorted and then re-attached it as a secondary drive.

Trying to look at it, Windows Explorer 'froze' for a bit but it did load a drive
icon eventually. However Windows Explorer was of no further help.

I then used XP's command.com and got the cryptic message 'cyclic redundancy
error'.

Any ideas what's up ? Is the drive destined for silicon hell or is it
recoverable ? I'm wondering if the system area's data's been trashed for
example.


If the drive spins up and locks in RPM and the actuator does click or
thrash and it's recognized by the BIOS then the data is recoverable by you
with the right software.

That's sort of what I was thinking. The drive is very quiet so it's not easy to
determine if it's spinning even. That's why I had it ! Even head movement is near
silent normally.

There's certainly no 'thrashing' though.


The CRC is an error that the data you're trying to read does not pass a redundant
check so you may have some bad blocks on the drive.

Again, that was roughly my thought. In years past I'd have used Norton disktools with
some certaintly that it would find what's up. Not sure what to do now. It's formatted
as FAT(32) not NTFS if that helps.


Graham