HDD Hell

[Sephiroth]

Ok, this is driving me nuts. Both my 80 gig 7200 rpm and 30 gig 5400 rpm Maxtor drives check out find when I run Maxtor's diagnostic program on them, but, I'm getting a hell of a lot of errors. Three times in the past few hours my pc has rebooted on it's own, not even a bsod to be helpful. When it reboots, my 30 gig drive isn't detected in the bios, i have to shutdown the pc and cut it back on for the drive to be picked up. I'm getting a lot of CRC errors on my 80 gig drive too. The 30 gig drive is around two years old, the 80 gig is around 3-4 months old tops. I know it isn't my motherboard either, because I've tried three different IDE controllers and they all have the same problems. UDMA is enabled on both drives fine as well. Any ideas? I'm at my wits end here... /me posts this before windows decides to reboot again

[BigHead50]

Just a couple of guesses to maybe consider...

I would try new or known good Cables for your HDs...

Also, I would make sure to use the 80 wire cables, not the older 40 wire....

If you have them on the same cable, try to put them on seperate channels to see if problem goes away...

The power supply may be getting weak...

And the last idea, Overheating ? is your drives in a very hot case with little or no air flow around the drives ?
Try opening up the case so the drives run cooler...

Just a few Ideas that come to mind when I hear this problem...

Hope one helps.....

SeeYa

[dady]

Sephiroth have u solved your problem? not sure if it will help but you may want to try reinstalling the OS hope it works out for you

[just_do_IT]

Adam just a thought...

You are not putting the ata ide cables in backwards are you....?

You know what i mean - some people reverse the cables to accomodate the sometimes long stretch from the hd to cd rom??

If not, then I go with trying a new 80 wire cable. Two hard drives crapping out at the same time is not likely - possible sure, but I doubt thats the case.

Its not like the good old days when you could reverse the data flow.

[skloo77]

if your issue is on/off, i suggest that u open up the chassis and observe the led on the hdd for activity light when booting up.

had a similar problems.
it was due to the loose power connector on the hdd. if i moved it, it works. system can boot.
but otherwise, bios can't detect.

[DanteG]

All solutions are already mentioned... Except for one:
It's the ultimate solution tho..
Make sure you turn your system to a single HDD system: IDE 1, disk 0.
If you backed up all data or it isn't important, get the Low Level Format utility of the HDD manufacturers site. This util performs a format which brings the drive back into factory state. No data retrieval possible anymore, etc. After that check the drives again for errors. If they still appear, then there's physically something wrong with the drive.
I had a similar problem with a 4 months old 80 Gb Maxtor. When using ServerMagic 4.0 it told me it had geometry errors, on reboot my BIOS told me a HDD was about to crash, so I managed to get all data (54 Gb) off of it and started the LLF. After that I ran a util from Maxtor which identified a SMART error on the board. So the platters were okay, the board wasn't... I sent it to Maxtor Ireland and got a brand new 80 Gb back 8 weeks later...

BTW, check on the Maxtor site for warranty on both drives. Probably even the 30 Gb still is in warranty... I know my 80 Gb (5400) still is. The 2 x 60 Gb (7200) should be as well, Maxtor hasn't released a date on those yet