A friend brought in his old toshiba laptop(satalite 4090) which had a
harddrive with lots of bad sectors. The laptop is a mess with mising panels
and he has rigged upa power supply directly to the battery terminals, the
power cord snaking in through a gap in the case.

I got him a cheap 1G hard drive from ebay that worked fine. 4 months later
he is back with 20 or more bad clusters scatterd right across the hard
drive.

Could this just be bad luck or could hardware problems on the laptop
(voltage spikes?) have caused this? I don't want him to put in another
harddrive for this to happen again in a couple of months.

Any comments welcome.

thanks,
Robert

"robert" writes:

A friend brought in his old toshiba laptop(satalite 4090) which had a
harddrive with lots of bad sectors. The laptop is a mess with mising panels
and he has rigged upa power supply directly to the battery terminals, the
power cord snaking in through a gap in the case.

I got him a cheap 1G hard drive from ebay that worked fine. 4 months later
he is back with 20 or more bad clusters scatterd right across the hard
drive.

Could this just be bad luck or could hardware problems on the laptop
(voltage spikes?) have caused this? I don't want him to put in another
harddrive for this to happen again in a couple of months.

Why not buy him a cheap laptop on eBay instead and put this thing out of
its misery.

Sure, power spikes are possible to kill sectors. Nothing wrong with the
drive if the sectors are mapped out.

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robert wrote:
I got him a cheap 1G hard drive from ebay that worked fine. 4 months
later he is back with 20 or more bad clusters scatterd right across
the hard drive.

Bad drive, bad drive controller, or memory corruption.

robert wrote:
A friend brought in his old toshiba laptop(satalite 4090) which had a
harddrive with lots of bad sectors. The laptop is a mess with mising panels
and he has rigged upa power supply directly to the battery terminals, the
power cord snaking in through a gap in the case.

I got him a cheap 1G hard drive from ebay that worked fine. 4 months later
he is back with 20 or more bad clusters scatterd right across the hard
drive.

Could this just be bad luck or could hardware problems on the laptop
(voltage spikes?) have caused this? I don't want him to put in another
harddrive for this to happen again in a couple of months.

Tell him to get the proper power supply. I inherited a Toshiba 4025 that
had a battery but no power supply/charger. Got on Ebay and found tons of
them. Got a perfectly good used one for under $15! Works great!

James

Bad RAM most likely.

JURB

On 25 Feb 2005 16:29:44 -0800, put finger to keyboard
and composed:

Bad RAM most likely.

JURB

I can see how bad RAM on the HD's PCB could cause this, but I can't
see how bad system RAM could be a factor. Bad system RAM would result
in corrupt data being written to the HD, and the HD would then
calculate and write a valid CRC based on this corrupt data, but this
would not give rise to a bad sector. A bad sector would be one where
the data read back from it does not match the CRC recorded with it.
This could happen if there was a media fault, or if the HD RAM was
faulty (???).


- Franc Zabkar
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