Hi Guys,

just want to let you know, that yesterday my main system suffered a fatal harddrive failure, so I may be unable to read my email and this forum for a while.

The harddrive began to to make whistling noises earlier, but has always recovered ... well, until yesterday. Now I am getting all kinds of read errors and so on.

I immediately went into town to buy a new one, but unfortunately my system is from 1999, and well, you guess it, as always hardware things have changed quite a bit since then. I had to learn that my BIOS is unable to deal with the large harddisks we have today (I had a 10GB and a 20GB, the latter went mad). I have done a BIOS update, but it says it supports only up to 75 GB and my new HD is a 80 GB. While it works quite well with Linux with its full size (maybe it bypasses the BIOS), the Windows fdisk treats it as 10 GB drive

So it seems, I will have to spend another 50 bucks on a new additional PCI Ultra-DMA100 Controller with its own BIOS which is able to handle the drive. I just hope, that all the work I have done with the new drive under Linux so far, that is rescuing whatever possible from the old drive, still works when the drive is attached to the new controller.

Rescuing as much as possible from the old drive was as well ... hm, adventurously. Sometimes the defect drive worked well for some time, but then stopped - and ya have to do a filesystem check again after the necessary hard reset.

Its kind of a nightmare.

Regards,

Guido

• RE: Fatal harddrive crash,Ben_Chiu, 18:15z, 10-06-02
  • RE: Fatal harddrive crash,Guido_Ostkamp, 22:06z, 10-12-02
    • RE: Fatal harddrive crash,RobertVA, 22:35z, 10-12-02
      • RE: Fatal harddrive crash,Mike_Greenwood, 03:08z, 10-13-02
• RE: Fatal harddrive crash,vgbaron, 22:06z, 10-06-02
  • RE: Fatal harddrive crash,Guido_Ostkamp, 22:07z, 10-12-02
• RE: Fatal harddrive crash,AlanParkinson, 22:58z, 10-06-02
  • RE: Fatal harddrive crash,TD, 20:21z, 10-07-02
    • RE: Fatal harddrive crash,Guido_Ostkamp, 22:07z, 10-12-02
  • RE: Fatal harddrive crash,Guido_Ostkamp, 22:06z, 10-12-02
• RE: Fatal harddrive crash,jerryrosie, 13:02z, 10-07-02
  • RE: Fatal harddrive crash,Guido_Ostkamp, 22:07z, 10-12-02
• RE: Fatal harddrive crash,Guido_Ostkamp, 22:07z, 10-12-02

Greetings Guido:

> Its kind of a nightmare.

Sorry to hear about the HD failure. FWIW, I've had very good luck with a HD utility called Spinrite (http://www.grc.com). As soon as a drive starts making any weird sounds, I run Spinrite and it can usually recover the data and either fix or mark the sector bad and move the data elsewhere. Unfortunately, it doesn't work for NTFS.

Your experience has reminded me to backup my data!

Good luck and we hope to have you back online again soon!

Ben

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Hi Ben,

> FWIW, I've had very good luck with a HD utility called Spinrite
> (http://www.grc.com). As soon as a drive starts making any weird
> sounds, I run Spinrite and it can usually recover the data and either
> fix or mark the sector bad and move the data elsewhere. Unfortunately,
> it doesn't work for NTFS.

I am sure this is a Windows utility, thus it won't work with my EXT2
partitions (a Linux filesystem). And in any case, this was not just a
bad block - then I would have heard other 'retrying' noises - but
something more worse. I think the drive motor or axle bearing (don't
know whether this is the right technical term for this in English) could
have been involved, the sound was really "screaming".

Fortunately I was able to save all information to my new harddisk, but
it was a 12 hours operation with a lot of failures, filesystem checks
and power-on/-off cycles in between.

> Your experience has reminded me to backup my data!

Always a good idea. Just wish, there would be a good backup media.
Nowadays this is nearly an impossible job, as a CD only holds 650 MB
which is nothing compared to 20-200 GB per harddisk.

We have come a long way since the old days when home computers used to
have cassette recorders as data storage or ran with two floppy disks
only - I still remember those times back in the early eighties.

Regards,

Guido

-OLR.PL v1.81-

One of my local acquaintances is heavy into high quality digital photography and MP3 music files. Both hobbies use large quantities of hard drive space. He has come to the conclusion the most practical solution to backups is a second computer system and an external IDE hard drive to transport files back and forth. The external drive he uses is installed in an “enclosure” that allows him to connect the drive through a USB port. The “enclosure” is designed to permit better transfer speeds when it is connected to a USB standard version 2.0 port. I place “enclosure” in quotation marks because he can’t replace the lid on the “enclosure” with the cooling fan he has attached to the top of the drive mechanism. The unit is about the size of a CD drive

This guy must be well funded though. He has a device called a "digital wallet" which is essentialy a 2 GB hard drive in a battery powered enclosure which can retrieve his photos from his camera's memory cards without the assistance of a computer. The entire enclosure, including its internal battery holder, is about the size of a standard IDE hard drive. The unit must have one of those little hard drives like the ones in a notebook computer in it.

Robert

Near KORF

Hi Robert,

>>He has come to the conclusion the most practical
solution to backups is a second computer system and an external IDE hard
drive to transport files back and forth. <<

I use the same method, but actually just use them through a network. Alas, a *true* backup is only good if it's kept offsite, in the event of something catastrauphic (sp?) like a fire. That, I am not doing, but it sounds as if your friend just might if he's using a portable HD.

--Greenie
**6 miles SSE KSJC**

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Guido -

>
> Its kind of a nightmare.
>

Been there, done that, got the T-Shirt - you have my sympathy <g>.

Good luck -

Vic

Of All the Things I've lost, I miss my mind the most!

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> Been there, done that, got the T-Shirt - you have my sympathy <g>.

Thanks, Vic. I have recovered (at least this time)

-OLR.PL v1.81-

Hi Guido,

Sorry to hear of your drive problems - they always occur at the worst moment.

> I have done a BIOS update, but it says it
> supports only up to 75 GB and my new HD is a 80 GB. While it works quite
> well with Linux with its full size (maybe it bypasses the BIOS), the
> Windows fdisk treats it as 10 GB drive
>
> So it seems, I will have to spend another 50 bucks on a new additional
> PCI Ultra-DMA100 Controller with its own BIOS which is able to handle
> the drive.

Before you spend any more money, this sounds very much like a problem with Windows, which can be fixed with a simple (free) download. If you're running Windows 98 or 95, fdisk cannot recognise drives larger than 64GB. If you put in a drive greater than this size, fdisk reports it as the DIFFERENCE in size, that is, if you fit a 74 GB drive fdisk will see it as 74-64GB or 10GB. This looks very close to the figures you gave, so that could be the real cause not the bios.

Take a look at the Microsoft knowledge base article:
"Fdisk Does Not Recognize Full Size of Hard Disks Larger than 64 GB (Q263044)"
You can try downloading a new version of fdisk that works correctly with large drives.

Alan

**** VPC OffLine Reader Version 1.0.0.0 ****
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I immediately went into town to buy a new one, but unfortunately my system is from 1999, and well, you guess it, as always hardware things have changed quite a bit since then. I had to learn that my BIOS is unable to deal with the large harddisks we have today (I had a 10GB and a 20GB, the latter went mad). I have done a BIOS update, but it says it supports only up to 75 GB and my new HD is a 80 GB. While it works quite well with Linux with its full size (maybe it bypasses the BIOS), the Windows fdisk treats it as 10 GB drive

When I got my first Western Digital 10 gigs, the BIOS on my P166 was unable to recognize anything larger than an 8 gig. Fortunately, there was a utility included that let me install the 10 gig, and allowed me to partition it into two 5 gig drives. Both work just fine. The software evidently bypasses the BIOS on the motherboard, you might check the WD website too.

"TD - Virtual FAA investigators are on line 2, AGAIN!!!"

Hi TD,

> When I got my first Western Digital 10 gigs, the BIOS on my P166 was
> unable to recognize anything larger than an 8 gig.

I remember having such problems with my older P133 which I still use as
a file server, but there was a BIOS update available at that time. I
doubt however, that there is another one available for the new disk
size.

While in the PC shop, the guys told me, that even the new controller I
bought now, is unable to run disks > 137 GB, because then you again need
another addressing scheme with double addresses and you need a UDMA 133
controller then. I really don't understand why they haven't invented a
good standard which truly can address huge space (or at least until a
few terabytes).

If you remember, we had already MFM; IDE, EIDE, ATA, ATA-2, Fast-IDE,
ATA-33, ATA-100 and now ATA-133 not to mention the SCSI substandards.

Regards,

Guido

-OLR.PL v1.81-

Hi Alan,

> Before you spend any more money, this sounds very much like a problem
> with Windows, which can be fixed with a simple (free) download. If
> you're running Windows 98 or 95, fdisk cannot recognise drives larger
> than 64GB. If you put in a drive greater than this size, fdisk reports
> it as the DIFFERENCE in size, that is, if you fit a 74 GB drive fdisk
> will see it as 74-64GB or 10GB. This looks very close to the figures
> you gave, so that could be the real cause not the bios.

thanks very much for this hint; the guy in one of our local PC shops
mentioned the same. However, I decided to buy the new controller anyway
for about US $40,just in case - I can use it to add more than 4 drives
at a time or in one of my older machines as well.

But you were right, with the updated fdisk the drive was detected as 76
GB drive. This is because of the fact that the harddisk companies tend
to use the utterly stupid definition of 1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes
although everyone knows that 1k = 1024 byte and thus 1 GB =
1,073,741,824 bytes.

> Take a look at the Microsoft knowledge base article: "Fdisk Does Not
> Recognize Full Size of Hard Disks Larger than 64 GB (Q263044)" You can
> try downloading a new version of fdisk that works correctly with large
> drives.

I had a hard time searching for this stuff (didn't know this response at
that time), but finally managed to find it. There are also other bugs
like M$$-Windows not flushing disk caches before shutting down the
machine and alike.

It is a shame that M$$ doesn't fix these bugs in an easy and convenient
official update. Nobody gets informed about these "hotfixes".

Regards,

Guido

-OLR.PL v1.81-

My deepest sympathies, Guido. Had that happen to me a couple of years ago and recovery is not fun. Good luck and get back to us as soon as you can.

***Reality - The refuge of those who can't handle simulation***
Cheers, Jerry (N94)

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Registered to: Gerald J. Rosie
**** OLR.PL Build 1.73 ****

> My deepest sympathies, Guido. Had that happen to me a couple of years
> ago and recovery is not fun. Good luck and get back to us as soon as
> you can.

Thanks, Jerry. I am back!

-OLR.PL v1.81-

BTW guys,

now that I have mastered my harddisk problems, you might be interested
to hear the followup story:

When I bought my new harddisk, I decided to take the plunge and add more
memory to my system as well. The manual said, my motherboard, a Gigabyte
6BXE for a Pentium-II 450, could use up to 256 MB SDRAM DRAM modules
with either 66-Mhz or 100-Mhz speed, so I wanted to buy an additional
128 MB module at 100-Mhz.

Unfortunately that was impossible, they had only 256 MB modules. When I
came home and looked at what I had bought I noticed the PC133 label and
went back the next day to ask whether they had given me the wrong one, I
needed PC100.

Well, they told me it was an Infineon multi-sync module and backwards
compatible to 100-Mhz and even 66-Mhz so I went home again to try it
out. However, with the new module and my old one (a 128 MB) in the
system, the BIOS counted only 256 MB. So I thought, hmm, it seems to
hide the old module, and went back again.

The PC-shop guys said it could be an incompatibility in access time, for
example the new module having 6 nanoseconds and the older one 8 - they
didn't accept to take it back for a refund, instead I should sell the
old one on ebay. Back at home again, I found that after removing the old
module, I could see only 128 MB of RAM. Huh?

Again at the dealer, I was told that my board apparently doesn't accept
single-threaded 256 MB modules. "single-threaded"? Never heard of it.
However, the contacts and chips on the DRAM module can be on either one
side of the modules or on two sides. They exchanged the module against
some with chips and contacts on both sides.

Fortunately the new one works flawlessly and I now have 384 MB on this
system. FS2002 seems to work more smoothly with it than with 128 MB.

Regards,

Guido

-OLR.PL v1.81-