WW2Planes1
Member
Sorry for the long post, just getting a lot of things knocked out here. Post is divided into sections if you don't feel like dealing with certain parts of it. I also did try to make the post at least semi-entertaining, but troubleshooting windows is only so much fun...
=======
Intro
=======
I recently built a new system:
Asus K8N-E (NF3 250)
Athlon 64 3000+
1 GB Crucial (2x512MB SS)
450?W Antec TruePower (pulled from old system)
GF 4 Ti4200 (pulled from old system)
Hercules Game Theater XP (pulled, but soon to return to old system)
ACER DVD Drive (Pulled)
32x12x40x CD-RW (Pulled)
modem (pulled)
hard drives: see below.
Ever since then I've been having incredible amounts of trouble with my hard drives.
======================
Part 1: My Hard Drives Hate Me
======================
Prologue:
In my system, I have, currently, 1x WD 1600JB (PATA), 1x WD 800JB (PATA), 1 120GB Maxtor (SATA) (also, 2 optical drives). The Maxtor is my primary drive w/ my OS, the two WDs are two of three from my old system (the third currently has a corrupted file table i think?, and will be discussed in a minute). The Maxtor has 3 partitions of equal size, one for Windows 2000 Pro, one for WXP x64 (currently nonfunctional) and one with files on it. The WD 160GB is one partition with all files on it, although buried in some folders are some incomplete windows installations (I usually keep my installations on one partition and my files on another, but I whenver I reformatted, I copied the entire contents of my system partition onto another drive, just in case). The WD 80GB is also in three partitions, one with a W2K install (from my old system, the one that generated the backups on the 160s) and two file partitions. My original goal was to have the two 160s in my new system with all the needed files (school stuff) from the 80, and for the 80 to become the sole hard drive of a backup system (make sense?). However, that was not to be...
The Installation:
It all starts when i'm trying to install Windows on the Maxtor. I usually like to have all the hardware i'm going to use preinstalled when I install Windows because in my mind its 1) easier than adding it later, and 2) I figure (maybe wrongly), that Windows "settles in" to a computer and adding stuff later is more likely to cause trouble than having that stuff in to begin with and allowing windows to "settle in" to a fully assembled computer. (I know I'm probably being stupid but sometimes anthropomorphizing my computer like that, but whatever. I also talk to myself, you got a problem with that 🙂.)
Anyway, the problem with this is because my Maxtor drive is on my SATA1 and my two WD drives (the 160s) are on the PATA Master channel, they show up as drives C and F, while the Maxtor is Drive E. Now, I really like it if my OS -or at least, my primary OS if I dual boot- is on C:. And there is no way (that I know of) to change drive letters in Windows setup. So, what I did was to unplug the two WD drives and install with just the Maxtor. Unfortunately when I plugged the WDs back in, the system wouldn't boot up any more. I can't remember exactly what how I decided to do this, but I ended up pulling the 80gig from my other system, booting to that with one of the drives (that worked, for some reason), running chkdsk on one of the 160s (yep, bad sectors), swapping for the other 160 (also bad sectors) swapping out the 80 so i'm running both 160s annnd... it still wouldn't boot, so I swap back to the 80, run chkdsh again and... more bad sectors???
Question 1:
Can anyone tell me why the simple act of swapping the IDE plugs on a hard drive (I didn't physically remove the drive from my case at all) would cause bad sectors? The drives have manufactured dates of late 2002 (December? I can't see right now, they're in my system, and I don't want to move them since they seem to be working), and early (march? may?) 2003. My 80gig has never given me problems and its much older.
In the process of all of this check disking, one of my 160GBs developed a corrupted file table... or at least, I think that's what it is, I'm not sure. The drive was practically full... ~140GBs of data, nothing critical, but it was all my MP3s, some MPGs, etc. (I've been trying to build a collection of the random stuff you find on the internet, like Matrix Pong, and other stuff, that was all there.) Its still all there, and i'm going to try and get it back when I'm done with the rest of this mess, but I'm not too worried right now.
There are loads more to my tale of woe of the last two weeks ("hey, I didn't know this Crucial stuff could do 2-2-2-10 at DDR400... oh, that's cause its DDR200" *ups clock speed* *BEEEEEEP!!!* OVERCLOCKING FAILED INSERT BIOS FLOPPY "did i forget to drop the mem timings after uping the clock speed? awww ****"), but I'm getting tired of typing and I'm sure you're getting tired or reading, so, just a few quick questions so this never, ever, ever happens again.
=====================
Part 2: A Few More Questions:
=====================
RAID 5 on a K8N-E:
1) This wonderful mobo has 6 SATA ports. 4 are from the Sil3114 which Asus claims supports RAID 5. Silicon Image says only 0, 1, 0+1, but further reading indicates maybe RAID 5 is availible through software? Is this true, has anyone used a K8N-E for RAID 5 and how does it work?
1.5) For this potential 4 disk RAID 5 array, I need 4 SATA hard drives. The total array should have more storage than two 160GB = 320GBs. I was thinking the Seagate Barracuda 7200.7, mostly for the 5 year warranty, but then I saw the WD Caviar RAID Edition. The price tag is really steep for a 250GB hard drive, but does anyone know about these? Are the features of any use to a personal RAID array? Is it worth the extra $$ (I'm guessing no here, but I figured I'd ask)?
Does anyone else have a different reccomendation for a good solid drive? Any drives to avoid?
2) Maxtor Drives:
I picked up a Maxtor 120Gb SATA from CompUSA (the retail version of this drive) when I was desparate to find a solution to above problems (actually, earlier, but still related problems). When I first plugged it in, I was appalled. The thing sounded worse than my old IBM Deathstar after it developed it's "click of death." I've heard of people complain about the "Western Digital Whine," but this is absurd. Do all Maxtors sound like that? I suppose it's not something that really bothers me, but i've been kind of a WD fanboy, and after reading complaint after complaint concerning the WD whine (which i never found the be that bad), I guess I assumed all other drives were, as the saying goes, silent as the grave. But i guess all those complaints just came from Seagate users 🙂 .
3) Vertically Mounting Hard Drives:
I am the proud owner of a Lian-Li PC-61 case (although I do admit is has its shortcomings... stupid motherboard standoffs!!!). For those of you who don't know, the PC-61 has a hard drive cage at the bottom of the case which mounts 5 hard drives vertically on their sides. My question is, could this affect the reliability of the drives. I am thinking specifically of the PS2's problem when you mount it vertically. How the CD laser can come out of alignment. Does mounting the hard drives vertically cause problems in the long term? I got the case in Feb of this year, and immediately put the drives in. maybe now is just their time?
I think that's it. I apologize for the absurdly long post. I really appretiate those of you who actually put forth the effort to read it and give me a hand. (I know usually I don't have the time to dedicate to a post of this magnitude, I'm just lucky in that I finished all my homework for tomorrow)
=======
Intro
=======
I recently built a new system:
Asus K8N-E (NF3 250)
Athlon 64 3000+
1 GB Crucial (2x512MB SS)
450?W Antec TruePower (pulled from old system)
GF 4 Ti4200 (pulled from old system)
Hercules Game Theater XP (pulled, but soon to return to old system)
ACER DVD Drive (Pulled)
32x12x40x CD-RW (Pulled)
modem (pulled)
hard drives: see below.
Ever since then I've been having incredible amounts of trouble with my hard drives.
======================
Part 1: My Hard Drives Hate Me
======================
Prologue:
In my system, I have, currently, 1x WD 1600JB (PATA), 1x WD 800JB (PATA), 1 120GB Maxtor (SATA) (also, 2 optical drives). The Maxtor is my primary drive w/ my OS, the two WDs are two of three from my old system (the third currently has a corrupted file table i think?, and will be discussed in a minute). The Maxtor has 3 partitions of equal size, one for Windows 2000 Pro, one for WXP x64 (currently nonfunctional) and one with files on it. The WD 160GB is one partition with all files on it, although buried in some folders are some incomplete windows installations (I usually keep my installations on one partition and my files on another, but I whenver I reformatted, I copied the entire contents of my system partition onto another drive, just in case). The WD 80GB is also in three partitions, one with a W2K install (from my old system, the one that generated the backups on the 160s) and two file partitions. My original goal was to have the two 160s in my new system with all the needed files (school stuff) from the 80, and for the 80 to become the sole hard drive of a backup system (make sense?). However, that was not to be...
The Installation:
It all starts when i'm trying to install Windows on the Maxtor. I usually like to have all the hardware i'm going to use preinstalled when I install Windows because in my mind its 1) easier than adding it later, and 2) I figure (maybe wrongly), that Windows "settles in" to a computer and adding stuff later is more likely to cause trouble than having that stuff in to begin with and allowing windows to "settle in" to a fully assembled computer. (I know I'm probably being stupid but sometimes anthropomorphizing my computer like that, but whatever. I also talk to myself, you got a problem with that 🙂.)
Anyway, the problem with this is because my Maxtor drive is on my SATA1 and my two WD drives (the 160s) are on the PATA Master channel, they show up as drives C and F, while the Maxtor is Drive E. Now, I really like it if my OS -or at least, my primary OS if I dual boot- is on C:. And there is no way (that I know of) to change drive letters in Windows setup. So, what I did was to unplug the two WD drives and install with just the Maxtor. Unfortunately when I plugged the WDs back in, the system wouldn't boot up any more. I can't remember exactly what how I decided to do this, but I ended up pulling the 80gig from my other system, booting to that with one of the drives (that worked, for some reason), running chkdsk on one of the 160s (yep, bad sectors), swapping for the other 160 (also bad sectors) swapping out the 80 so i'm running both 160s annnd... it still wouldn't boot, so I swap back to the 80, run chkdsh again and... more bad sectors???
Question 1:
Can anyone tell me why the simple act of swapping the IDE plugs on a hard drive (I didn't physically remove the drive from my case at all) would cause bad sectors? The drives have manufactured dates of late 2002 (December? I can't see right now, they're in my system, and I don't want to move them since they seem to be working), and early (march? may?) 2003. My 80gig has never given me problems and its much older.
In the process of all of this check disking, one of my 160GBs developed a corrupted file table... or at least, I think that's what it is, I'm not sure. The drive was practically full... ~140GBs of data, nothing critical, but it was all my MP3s, some MPGs, etc. (I've been trying to build a collection of the random stuff you find on the internet, like Matrix Pong, and other stuff, that was all there.) Its still all there, and i'm going to try and get it back when I'm done with the rest of this mess, but I'm not too worried right now.
There are loads more to my tale of woe of the last two weeks ("hey, I didn't know this Crucial stuff could do 2-2-2-10 at DDR400... oh, that's cause its DDR200" *ups clock speed* *BEEEEEEP!!!* OVERCLOCKING FAILED INSERT BIOS FLOPPY "did i forget to drop the mem timings after uping the clock speed? awww ****"), but I'm getting tired of typing and I'm sure you're getting tired or reading, so, just a few quick questions so this never, ever, ever happens again.
=====================
Part 2: A Few More Questions:
=====================
RAID 5 on a K8N-E:
1) This wonderful mobo has 6 SATA ports. 4 are from the Sil3114 which Asus claims supports RAID 5. Silicon Image says only 0, 1, 0+1, but further reading indicates maybe RAID 5 is availible through software? Is this true, has anyone used a K8N-E for RAID 5 and how does it work?
1.5) For this potential 4 disk RAID 5 array, I need 4 SATA hard drives. The total array should have more storage than two 160GB = 320GBs. I was thinking the Seagate Barracuda 7200.7, mostly for the 5 year warranty, but then I saw the WD Caviar RAID Edition. The price tag is really steep for a 250GB hard drive, but does anyone know about these? Are the features of any use to a personal RAID array? Is it worth the extra $$ (I'm guessing no here, but I figured I'd ask)?
Does anyone else have a different reccomendation for a good solid drive? Any drives to avoid?
2) Maxtor Drives:
I picked up a Maxtor 120Gb SATA from CompUSA (the retail version of this drive) when I was desparate to find a solution to above problems (actually, earlier, but still related problems). When I first plugged it in, I was appalled. The thing sounded worse than my old IBM Deathstar after it developed it's "click of death." I've heard of people complain about the "Western Digital Whine," but this is absurd. Do all Maxtors sound like that? I suppose it's not something that really bothers me, but i've been kind of a WD fanboy, and after reading complaint after complaint concerning the WD whine (which i never found the be that bad), I guess I assumed all other drives were, as the saying goes, silent as the grave. But i guess all those complaints just came from Seagate users 🙂 .
3) Vertically Mounting Hard Drives:
I am the proud owner of a Lian-Li PC-61 case (although I do admit is has its shortcomings... stupid motherboard standoffs!!!). For those of you who don't know, the PC-61 has a hard drive cage at the bottom of the case which mounts 5 hard drives vertically on their sides. My question is, could this affect the reliability of the drives. I am thinking specifically of the PS2's problem when you mount it vertically. How the CD laser can come out of alignment. Does mounting the hard drives vertically cause problems in the long term? I got the case in Feb of this year, and immediately put the drives in. maybe now is just their time?
I think that's it. I apologize for the absurdly long post. I really appretiate those of you who actually put forth the effort to read it and give me a hand. (I know usually I don't have the time to dedicate to a post of this magnitude, I'm just lucky in that I finished all my homework for tomorrow)
