Need IBM DeskStar 75GXP Expert Opinion

[Mule]

I have a year old 45 Gig hard drive and that sucker crapped out on me a few days ago. Before that it ran strong as a rock without any problems at all.

What happened was that it would not read the drive anymore. BIOS recognized it, but upon bootup in either WinME or 2000 it just froze, once it gave me a "cannot write to disk" error.

I then ran IBM's DFT program and when it tried to Analyse the media, it would not respond. It said that I had one or more bad sectors on the hard disk. It suggested that I run Erase Disk(a built in tool), which I did and then I formatted the drive using FDISK and now it seems to work O.K.

What I was really concerned about was the reliability of this drive now. I know that this series of IBM drives has a high failure rate and if the symptoms of the problem I just had was part of a larger problem. Question now is do I fleebay this drive and get another, more reliable drive or stick with it and hope it's just a one time problem.

 

[PraetorChu]

was the error something like delayed write error? to /device/harddisk#

if it was, then i doubt there is much you can do. i had similar problems....after reformat the drive would work for a while before crapping out again.
i read online and found out there is probably a hardware problem. i could not find a way to recover the data either....sorry if that is the error you are getting.

 

[Bovinicus]

I would suggest that you get a new harddisk. In my experinces when harddrives exhibit a few bad sectors, and they are not related to some traumatic shock injury, they will begin to spread. If you really don't have the money for another harddisk, it may be worth a shot seeing if it will hold up. Just make sure that you have the bad sectors marked as bad, so that they never get used. It is possible for it to at least hold up a little longer. I would just be a little more careful and backup your data fairly often, around once a week. Your more sensitive documents maybe even more often. This decision is up to you, an expert can't tell you wether or not to take a risk. Good luck with whatever decision you make.

 

[Mule]

<< In my experinces when harddrives exhibit a few bad sectors, and they are not related to some traumatic shock injury, they will begin to spread. >>

Well actually.......I kinda dropped my box from my bed onto the floor, a good 2.5 feet I would say. However, it was working after that. A couple of days later it started crapping out.