Here's one I've never had before. Earlier this week, my wife informed me
that a business-related CD ROM that she uses regularly on my machine, was
failing to read. She was right. Further investigation revealed that the
machine, a Dell, could no longer see my 250GB data drive either. This drive
is a Seagate, and was replaced probably a little over a year ago, because
its predecessor, which had been in there a long time, had begun dying with
nasty noises and erratic reads. Both the CD ROM drive and the Seagate, are
on IDE channel 1, in cable select format.

My first suspicion was that something had happened to the mother board's IDE
driver IC, but the Windoze diagnostic said that it was ok. Further checks
disconnecting stuff, showed the problem to be the Seagate drive that was
hanging up the channel 1 IDE bus. As soon as it was disconnected, the CD ROM
drive came back on line.

I got a new 320GB drive from Maplin's for 49 quid (how good a deal is that
?) and was able to restore its contents from the external backup drive that
I have, and which does a backup automatically every night.

I've never had a drive fail in this way before, problems usually being motor
or bearing related. Anyone else had it ?

Arfa

I had a non-mechanical problem with a hard drive that started acting screwy
and wouldn't format.

I also had an ASUS CD ROM drive fail because of PROM failure. The symptoms
were weird.

In article , "Arfa Daily" wrote:
Here's one I've never had before. Earlier this week, my wife informed me
that a business-related CD ROM that she uses regularly on my machine, was
failing to read. She was right. Further investigation revealed that the
machine, a Dell, could no longer see my 250GB data drive either. This drive
is a Seagate, and was replaced probably a little over a year ago, because
its predecessor, which had been in there a long time, had begun dying with
nasty noises and erratic reads. Both the CD ROM drive and the Seagate, are
on IDE channel 1, in cable select format.

My first suspicion was that something had happened to the mother board's IDE
driver IC, but the Windoze diagnostic said that it was ok. Further checks
disconnecting stuff, showed the problem to be the Seagate drive that was
hanging up the channel 1 IDE bus. As soon as it was disconnected, the CD ROM
drive came back on line.

I got a new 320GB drive from Maplin's for 49 quid (how good a deal is that
?) and was able to restore its contents from the external backup drive that
I have, and which does a backup automatically every night.

I've never had a drive fail in this way before, problems usually being motor
or bearing related. Anyone else had it ?

Arfa


If it was locking up the bus it was most likely neither, it was most likely
the electronics on the drive that was going out.

Arfa Daily wrote:

Here's one I've never had before. Earlier this week, my wife informed me
that a business-related CD ROM that she uses regularly on my machine, was
failing to read. She was right. Further investigation revealed that the
machine, a Dell, could no longer see my 250GB data drive either. This drive
is a Seagate, and was replaced probably a little over a year ago, because
its predecessor, which had been in there a long time, had begun dying with
nasty noises and erratic reads. Both the CD ROM drive and the Seagate, are
on IDE channel 1, in cable select format.

My first suspicion was that something had happened to the mother board's IDE
driver IC, but the Windoze diagnostic said that it was ok. Further checks
disconnecting stuff, showed the problem to be the Seagate drive that was
hanging up the channel 1 IDE bus. As soon as it was disconnected, the CD ROM
drive came back on line.

I got a new 320GB drive from Maplin's for 49 quid (how good a deal is that
?) and was able to restore its contents from the external backup drive that
I have, and which does a backup automatically every night.

I've never had a drive fail in this way before, problems usually being motor
or bearing related. Anyone else had it ?

God works in mysterious ways ! ;~)

Graham

I did but in my case it was very clear what the problem was. The loud
noises coming from the hard drive game me a good indication of what
was causing the problem. In my case I even if it was the mobo or DVD
drive, both were under warranty and I had put the hard drive in my old
PC in there to transfer everything and just left it in there. I
suppose it was lucky that I had not decided to use it to store data.

On Sun, 6 Jul 2008 15:43:03 +0100, "Arfa Daily"
put finger to keyboard and composed:

My first suspicion was that something had happened to the mother board's IDE
driver IC, but the Windoze diagnostic said that it was ok. Further checks
disconnecting stuff, showed the problem to be the Seagate drive that was
hanging up the channel 1 IDE bus. As soon as it was disconnected, the CD ROM
drive came back on line.

I've never had a drive fail in this way before, problems usually being motor
or bearing related. Anyone else had it ?

Arfa

If a drive has bad blocks, then Windows will appear to hang while it
repeatedly retries the affected reads or writes. If a drive doesn't
spin up, then the BIOS may appear to hang while it is waiting for it
to do so. Eventually it should time out and move on.

I have two Fujitsu drives that have a faulty Cirrus Logic IC. This
model series featured in a law suit. The failure symptoms are
sometimes as you describe, while at other times I will get reams of
bad blocks which come good on the next try.

- Franc Zabkar
--
Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.

Arfa Daily wrote:

Here's one I've never had before. Earlier this week, my wife informed
me that a business-related CD ROM that she uses regularly on my
machine, was failing to read. She was right. Further investigation
revealed that the machine, a Dell, could no longer see my 250GB data
drive either. This drive is a Seagate, and was replaced probably a
little over a year ago, because its predecessor, which had been in
there a long time, had begun dying with nasty noises and erratic
reads. Both the CD ROM drive and the Seagate, are on IDE channel 1, in
cable select format.

My first suspicion was that something had happened to the mother
board's IDE driver IC, but the Windoze diagnostic said that it was ok.
Further checks disconnecting stuff, showed the problem to be the
Seagate drive that was hanging up the channel 1 IDE bus. As soon as it
was disconnected, the CD ROM drive came back on line.

I got a new 320GB drive from Maplin's for 49 quid (how good a deal is
that ?) and was able to restore its contents from the external backup
drive that I have, and which does a backup automatically every night.

I've never had a drive fail in this way before, problems usually being
motor or bearing related. Anyone else had it ?

Arfa

Very common ! If its still under warranty return it to Seagate. Since
the lead free thing I've seem a number of problems like this. A common
one is the the solder joints behind the connector seem to fail. I just
go over the bad ones with a soldering iron and fresh solder. You can
actually see the cracks with a 20X loupe.

--
Best Regards:
Baron.

Franc Zabkar wrote:

On Sun, 6 Jul 2008 15:43:03 +0100, "Arfa Daily"
put finger to keyboard and composed:

My first suspicion was that something had happened to the mother
board's IDE driver IC, but the Windoze diagnostic said that it was ok.
Further checks disconnecting stuff, showed the problem to be the
Seagate drive that was hanging up the channel 1 IDE bus. As soon as it
was disconnected, the CD ROM drive came back on line.

I've never had a drive fail in this way before, problems usually being
motor or bearing related. Anyone else had it ?

Arfa

If a drive has bad blocks, then Windows will appear to hang while it
repeatedly retries the affected reads or writes. If a drive doesn't
spin up, then the BIOS may appear to hang while it is waiting for it
to do so. Eventually it should time out and move on.

I have two Fujitsu drives that have a faulty Cirrus Logic IC. This
model series featured in a law suit. The failure symptoms are
sometimes as you describe, while at other times I will get reams of
bad blocks which come good on the next try.

- Franc Zabkar

You try getting Fujitsu to replace them ! No way ! I will not under
any circumstances buy their drives... Not even if they gave them
away !

--
Best Regards:
Baron.

Meat Plow wrote:

On Mon, 07 Jul 2008 11:43:33 +0100, Baron wrote:

Franc Zabkar wrote:

On Sun, 6 Jul 2008 15:43:03 +0100, "Arfa Daily"
put finger to keyboard and composed:

My first suspicion was that something had happened to the mother
board's IDE driver IC, but the Windoze diagnostic said that it was
ok. Further checks disconnecting stuff, showed the problem to be the
Seagate drive that was hanging up the channel 1 IDE bus. As soon as
it was disconnected, the CD ROM drive came back on line.

I've never had a drive fail in this way before, problems usually
being motor or bearing related. Anyone else had it ?

Arfa

If a drive has bad blocks, then Windows will appear to hang while it
repeatedly retries the affected reads or writes. If a drive doesn't
spin up, then the BIOS may appear to hang while it is waiting for it
to do so. Eventually it should time out and move on.

I have two Fujitsu drives that have a faulty Cirrus Logic IC. This
model series featured in a law suit. The failure symptoms are
sometimes as you describe, while at other times I will get reams of
bad blocks which come good on the next try.

- Franc Zabkar

You try getting Fujitsu to replace them ! No way ! I will not under
any circumstances buy their drives... Not even if they gave them
away !

I had problems with a Dell Poweredge server and 1 of the 3 factory
installed Fujitsu drives 1 day after setting it up. They sent another
Fujitsu drive and that lasted a month. Dell sent yet another
replacement and a few weeks later one of the original drives failed. I
talked the owner into buying 3 Seagate drives and I reinstalled the
operating system and restored data from the backup. The server is
still in use after 4 years.

I've never had problems with Dell's services. Fujitsu will tell you to
return the drive to the original vendor. Which is fine if the original
vendor still exists. An awful lot of Fujitsu drives were sold by
vendors that vanished within a few months. I know of one that traded
under three different names from the same address. But none of those
names were the one that he used to make purchases with, from the
manufacturers !

--
Best Regards:
Baron.

Arfa Daily wrote:
Here's one I've never had before. Earlier this week, my wife informed me
that a business-related CD ROM that she uses regularly on my machine, was
failing to read. She was right. Further investigation revealed that the
machine, a Dell, could no longer see my 250GB data drive either. This drive
is a Seagate, and was replaced probably a little over a year ago, because
its predecessor, which had been in there a long time, had begun dying with
nasty noises and erratic reads. Both the CD ROM drive and the Seagate, are
on IDE channel 1, in cable select format.

My first suspicion was that something had happened to the mother board's IDE
driver IC, but the Windoze diagnostic said that it was ok. Further checks
disconnecting stuff, showed the problem to be the Seagate drive that was
hanging up the channel 1 IDE bus. As soon as it was disconnected, the CD ROM
drive came back on line.

I got a new 320GB drive from Maplin's for 49 quid (how good a deal is that
?) and was able to restore its contents from the external backup drive that
I have, and which does a backup automatically every night.

I've never had a drive fail in this way before, problems usually being motor
or bearing related. Anyone else had it ?

Arfa



In one of the latest trade rags I get, there was an article citing the
shorter than usual life of the larger (e.g. 320 GB) hard drives. One
mfg in particular (and I don't remember the name) was having more
trouble than the others, but, they all were having probs. Various
reasons were given, but the two things most discussed were heat and the
high density on the platters...So, at the very least, make sure the disk
is well ventilated...You can't do much about the other...
John

Arfa Daily wrote:
Here's one I've never had before. Earlier this week, my wife informed me
that a business-related CD ROM that she uses regularly on my machine, was
failing to read. She was right. Further investigation revealed that the
machine, a Dell, could no longer see my 250GB data drive either. This drive
is a Seagate, and was replaced probably a little over a year ago, because
its predecessor, which had been in there a long time, had begun dying with
nasty noises and erratic reads. Both the CD ROM drive and the Seagate, are
on IDE channel 1, in cable select format.

My first suspicion was that something had happened to the mother board's IDE
driver IC, but the Windoze diagnostic said that it was ok. Further checks
disconnecting stuff, showed the problem to be the Seagate drive that was
hanging up the channel 1 IDE bus. As soon as it was disconnected, the CD ROM
drive came back on line.

I got a new 320GB drive from Maplin's for 49 quid (how good a deal is that
?) and was able to restore its contents from the external backup drive that
I have, and which does a backup automatically every night.

I've never had a drive fail in this way before, problems usually being motor
or bearing related. Anyone else had it ?

Arfa



Hosed controller board, probably shorting a few data lines.

hi, why have you got it in cable select ? i thought u are supposed to
have it as master and slave ?
have u tried it like that ?
mark k


"nobody " wrote in message
news
Arfa Daily wrote:
Here's one I've never had before. Earlier this week, my wife informed me
that a business-related CD ROM that she uses regularly on my machine, was
failing to read. She was right. Further investigation revealed that the
machine, a Dell, could no longer see my 250GB data drive either. This
drive is a Seagate, and was replaced probably a little over a year ago,
because its predecessor, which had been in there a long time, had begun
dying with nasty noises and erratic reads. Both the CD ROM drive and the
Seagate, are on IDE channel 1, in cable select format.

My first suspicion was that something had happened to the mother board's
IDE driver IC, but the Windoze diagnostic said that it was ok. Further
checks disconnecting stuff, showed the problem to be the Seagate drive
that was hanging up the channel 1 IDE bus. As soon as it was
disconnected, the CD ROM drive came back on line.

I got a new 320GB drive from Maplin's for 49 quid (how good a deal is
that ?) and was able to restore its contents from the external backup
drive that I have, and which does a backup automatically every night.

I've never had a drive fail in this way before, problems usually being
motor or bearing related. Anyone else had it ?

Arfa

Hosed controller board, probably shorting a few data lines.