Twilight Zone computing

[Muse]

I just had a bizarre episode. I was in a Windows 2000 SP2 session. In fact, I was in the midst of ordering a couple of new HDs online when I got a call from a client. I tried to run the essentially DOS based application that I support for this client and I experienced what seemed like a crash. It took a few seconds to take hold, but everything just locked up. The mouse cursor wouldn't move, no response from the keyboard, Control+Alt+Delete did nothing, so I hit the reset button and left the room. When I came back I couldn't recognize my desktop. All the icons were over on the left hand side of the screen. Having seen this sort of thing before I wasn't about to panic. I figured I'd just run WinTidy and restore my icon positions. Then I noticed that Wintidy wasn't there in my tray. I began looking at my icons and couldn't find several I expected. Going into explorer I couldn't see any of the partitions on my 1st HD and I saw that I had actually booted from my 2nd HD (the first partition of which was now my C: partition) and I figured that my 1st HD had just died, an IBM 60GXP 60 GB. My 2nd HD is an IBM 60GXP 40 GB, the first partition of which is bootable in Windows 2000. This sort of thing has never happened to me before.

Well, I make fairly regular Ghost images of my boot partition and back up my other stuff as I see fit - not exactly clockwork, but I figured that I wasn't suffering a catastrophe.

I booted to a CDROM with Ghost and acted like I wanted to make an image of a partition on my 1st HD just to see what would happen. I got this message:

NTFS Problem Detected

Ghost has detected problems with a NTFS partition. We recommend that you quit Ghost and correct the problem by rebooting NT and running CHKDSK.

You may also attempt to continue normally or perform a sector by sector copy of the partition.

Quit.......... Continue.......... Sector Copy

I quit and reset and my 1st HD booted as normal. What was this about? I think I will go ahead and order those 2 HDs and make them my 1st system HDs and relegate the IBMs to my second system. That was my plan... 😀

 

[alkemyst]

seems like the HD died in the midst of everything....

very wierd problem though....I would try to find the manufacturer's drive diagnostics and see what they say.

Any high pitched whines or wierd noises from the drive? CLICKS! ?

 

[Muse]

Originally posted by: alkemyst
seems like the HD died in the midst of everything....

very wierd problem though....I would try to find the manufacturer's drive diagnostics and see what they say.

Any high pitched whines or wierd noises from the drive? CLICKS! ?

I think you're right - I should get IBM's drive diagnostics and run them. The drive doesn't click but it does make a sort of periodic whirring sound occasionally, and it bothers me - just the noise. I used to think it was a fan but I decided a few days ago that it's one of my HDs.

The drive didn't die today. It just seemed to die. Fortunately, it came back to life. I think it had something to do with some corruption in Windows 2000. I didn't see the system try to boot but when I came back to the reset machine it was booted to the first partition on my 2nd drive. Very weird, at least in my experience. I'm not sure if I should do anything about this. I just ordered two new 80 GB HDs, so if this drive lasts until then I will Ghost my current drives to the new drives and put my current drives in my 2nd system where a failure probably won't be a big deal. I've been pretty lucky, I guess - I've had all the following HDs and not one has failed:

Maxtor 212 mb
Conner 420 mb
Maxtor 2.7 gb
IBM 8.4 gb
IBM 40 gb
IBM 60 gb

Even with my luck I'm trying not to be complacent. At least once in a while I think about how I'd feel if my HDs crash. I try to be pretty backed up.