HD from Hell.

[maharito]

Well, my little brother's hard drive has done it again.

I spent all this morning trying to fix his comp, because his hard drive occasionally is not properly recognized. (For example, when it should come up SAMSUNG xxxxx... on the POST screen, I instead get QAESUNE xxxxx... , the size is wrong and the drive is unusable in any OS.) At the same time, I was trying to finagle the Windows XP into recognizing this drive as it originally was (D when it got changed to G: after previous hard drive installations that have since been taken out.

Well, I got the hard drive letter issue resolved, and I also figured out that the hard drive cable was faulty. Even though another hard drive had no problems, there must've been some touching or disconnected wires in the part that connected to his drive.

AND NOW...the drive doesn't work in Windows XP!!!! >.<

When I boot it with Hiren's BootCD v6.0, the drive works just fine. It's got one FAT32 partition. The usable size is about 38GB. Though the drive works fine in a standard command prompt, PartitionMagic 8.2 for DOS reports that its FAT copies don't match, then bombs out with an error. (In Windows XP PartitionMagic 7.0, the drive reports an error #1806.) PartitionMagic for DOS or XP gets the drive size correct and the filetype correct but all other things (used space, free space, label) are horribly wrong. There is no option to fix the FAT. Scandisk for DOS reports that the FAT is 'just fine.' Scandisk for Windows doesn't even work.

So, I'm led to believe that DOS relies on an undamaged FAT while Windows XP uses a bogus one that must've been created when the computer booted and the cable was faulty. (I've since replaced the cable and it never misreports the drive presence now.)

WHAT DO I DO NOW?

For now, I'll check out other utilities on this nice Hiren's BootCD, but I'm hesitant to overwrite FATs unless I can be certain I'm replacing the bad one and not the good one!!

 

[LTC8K6]

Have you tried booting to the XP cd and doing a repair?

 

[meltdown75]

Hmm. My question to you would be: if you plan on using the drive with XP, why haven't you formatted using NTFS instead of FAT?

Also, are the mobo BIOS updated?

 

[Laputa]

I think it's a bad Samsung drive. They go bad with wear signs at first and then bad sectors, and then totally inaccessable. Should invest the money for the new drive instead of the extra time to waste.

 

[maharito]

Ay. *sigh*

Well, I guess this is just a forum and not a true 'you ask we answer' place. Thanks for the attempted input guys.

1) XP CD repair is for repairing Windows. The only thing it does to hard drives is delete and create partitions. Let's say I want to keep everything that's on the drive. How's that sound?

2) My lil bro's hard drive originally had Windows 98 on it before I put a copy of XP on there. (Mind you, it's not the default bootable drive.) I kept it FAT so it could still run 98 if desired, as well as be available for old-school DOS games or anything I might need to do outside of Windows. (I can use NTFS DOS Professional on Hiren's Boot CD to make my HD usable...but outside of that, I'm kind of stuck.)

3) Yes, the K7SEM Revision 1.0's BIOS is updated to its highest level. Unfortunately, though it claims to now run Athlon XPs, it crashes whenever I try to use my spare 2400+ in it. Sad huh?

4) I've had various drives do both well and poorly, and in this range of time I've seen everything from head failures to sector wear to damaged readers. I'm convinced that as long as a drive is name-brand and is not one specifically stated as faulty (IBM 75Gig, for example), it could run for years and years with some luck and avoiding diagnostic programs that hang. (Norton Speed Disk, anyone?) I use a program called SpinRite on the BootCD to check on hard drive health, and it can even bypass HD's automatic attempts to reread to search for difficult sectors before they are totally unusable. That's not the case. The drive is fine.

5) I FIXED IT! I ran Norton Disk Doctor for DOS, which allowed me to repair the tables (apparently the damage was actually in the boot sector). Though the program crashed later, it fixed the table and now the drive runs great. (Good thing too! I wasn't able to make an Undo, and if it 'fixed' the right table, that would've really hurt... >.<)

 

[LTC8K6]

XP's repair option is to repair the installation. It will keep the installation intact.

I have successfully repaired a number of XP installations using the repair option on the CD and I never created or deleted any partitions.

Convert the drive to NTFS and you will have a lot less trouble.