On Thu, 19 Jul 2007 00:02:02 +0100, Eeyore
put finger to keyboard and
composed:

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'.

I don't use Windows XP, but I know that its command interpreter is
actually cmd.exe.

As for the CRC error, I don't understand why invoking a file on the
[good?] master drive would be a problem, unless the slave was hanging
up the IDE channel. To eliminate this possibility, I'd move the
Deskstar to the secondary IDE channel, on its own, configured as
master.

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.

Graham

AIUI, when a 512 byte sector is written to a HD, the HD's controller
calculates a CRC for that sector and writes it to the HD. When the
data is retrieved from the HD, the controller recomputes a new CRC and
checks to see that it matches the one that was recorded with the
original data.

I'd use the manufacturer's diagnostic utility to do a sector by sector
scan of the HD.

IBM/Hitachi Drive Fitness Test:
http://www.hgst.com/hdd/support/download.htm

Or you could try Scandisk with a thorough surface scan.

- Franc Zabkar
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