Massive corruption on HDD but subsequent surface tests all OK

[KenG]

Hello all,

My Abit SE6, PIII 700, 128 mb Corsair PC133 cas2, Win98se, IBM 30 gig 7200 rpm ata100 dtla 307030 has had the same thing happen twice. Lockup and won't boot, boot with emergency startup disk and scandisk finds massively fragmented data which it "fixed" Bottom line, a fresh install was required.

Subsequent testing of the HD -- completely normal. Not even a single sector marked as bad when the surface scan was tested.

A month later .... same thing. (Only this time I had a ghost to replace everything.)

What do you folks think is likely to be the problem? Am I going to have to go out and start replacing components one by one until it doesn't happen anymore? If so, what should I replace first? Which component is most likely to have such an intermittent problem?

Thanks in advance for your time.

Ken

 

[WarCon]

Have you thorough (surface) tested the drive to be sure its ok? One more quick question. Do you get brown outs where your system goes off while its working?

And just so I am sure exactly what the problem is, scandisk is finding corrupted directories? And is unable to repair them correctly and you have missing files and strangly named stuff? If this is the case, this can happen when your hard drive is writing to the directory structure and power goes out and it writes garbage there. Also have seen it with failing hard drives, but almost always those start giving a little metal "ting" sound first. The head exceeding set bounds for movement it mashes into the wall and then will slam the platters and make your drive go bad.

If your drive is fine, then you have two areas to focus on. The motherboard and memory. But get the IBM drive diagnostic utility, don't know its name but I am sure they have one. And give your drive a thorough test.

 

[KenG]

Thanks WarCon.

What happens is the computer locks up. Then it can't reboot in the usual (c-drive) way. The first time it said (something like) "non system disk". The second time it happened it said certain files were missing, like himem.sys, and a couple of others. The second time there still WAS a windows directory (I found out when I booted from the floppy), but it didn't have anything like the number of subdirectories and other files that are usually there.

So, I go to the floppy boot disk for Win98se.

When the startup disk boots it eventually leads to scandisk running from DOS. Scandisk finds errors (on the c-drive) and offers to fix them (with or without an "undo" disk). Scandisk reports finding fragments of what I believe it calls "files which were probably previously folders (or maybe it calls them previously directories). In any case the "fix" makes a bunch of consecutively numbered directories which do have various files in them. You can tell what most of them USED to be. None are the whole thing of whatever they were. So Scandisk is right, they WERE directories and they are all broken up. When you look at the C: drive there are a FEW intact directories and then the rest of these "fixed" directories which are useless.

So, it appears that a sudden and fairly massive event takes place or maybe a focused event in the FAT could do it.

The drive is quiet and like I said before, passes the Windows disk tests including surface test with NO problem.

I found the IBM test disk you suggested and I will try that too. I was thinking about the controller or the cable. I don't know if there is any software that can check the controller.

Anyway, thanks for your reply. You've helped already.

Ken

 

[Mday]

got virus?