What happened to my hard drive?

[DavidoFoo]

Originally posted by: Jeff7

Originally posted by: DavidoFoo
I ran Maxtor's diagnostic tool "PowerMax" and it said that my drive is failing. Could this be due to an IDE cable or is my drive really failing. 🙁

You mentioned that "it marked some file sectors unreadable" - sounds like bad sectors. I have yet to see a faulty cable cause a drive to think it's got bad sectors. They're usually the result of physical damage on the drive platter. RMA time it seems. If you can get an advance RMA, Maxtor will send you a drive first. That way, you can copy all data off of the original, if it's still accessible, and then send it back. They want a credit card number though for that, as collateral, otherwise you send your drive first, then they send a replacement.

I think it was something like that, I'm not really all too sure. Dude to physical damage? Like what, bumping into the case or something? Is there any way for me to check what a previous chkdsk has reported?

 

[yaleblor]

have you gone to the maxtor support site and looked for an answer
http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/Maxto...2460b46068/?channelpath=/en_us/Support
bet you can resolve your issue with a little research here .
also over at http://www.majorgeeks.com/
there are a bunch of diagnostics for drives ,alot of them are free,i cant say if they're good or bad but once again you can easily find out

 

[vrbaba]

Originally posted by: katwomansz
In my opinion it isn't worth the risk to your machine to try and get free music. Threats of virus, corruption, dialers, malicious destructions of dats just isn't worth it for me. Plus maybe I'm old fashioned but I like to support the artists I listen to by buying their CDs. If you have invested thousands in your computer you can buy a CD. As a matter of fact I use the $30 difference between dial up and broadband to buy at least 2 CDs a month.

But then again I don't need broadband to play games online. Maybe cheating has been solved but last time I tried to play the latest games it just really ruined the whole experience. As did the trash talking kids who play hours more than me a day and don't seem to need to work to buy their computers. Plus I just don't have the reflexes to match those of a 15 year old... end of rant...

lol....what are you talking about?
this guy is asking on how to save his hard disk. you are tlakin abt piracy and annoyance with online hardcore gamers....sure u have the right thread to post?

he has anime on his computers...and as far as I know, they are legal since many have no copyrights on them. and there is no way of buying it here in the US

 

[DavidoFoo]

Originally posted by: yaleblor
have you gone to the maxtor support site and looked for an answer
http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/Maxto...2460b46068/?channelpath=/en_us/Support
bet you can resolve your issue with a little research here .
also over at http://www.majorgeeks.com/
there are a bunch of diagnostics for drives ,alot of them are free,i cant say if they're good or bad but once again you can easily find out

Thanks for the advice. I'll do that as soon as possible. I'm just afraid that my hard drive is failing 🙁

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: DavidoFoo

I think it was something like that, I'm not really all too sure. Dude to physical damage? Like what, bumping into the case or something? Is there any way for me to check what a previous chkdsk has reported?

Possibly. Sometimes these things just seem to appear out of nowhere though. I don't really know of any documentation on the causes of bad sectors. The only obvious cases I saw were when there were little pinpricks on the platters. Of course, how they formed in the first place, I don't know. I know that the "reason" that the drive marks a sector as bad is that it is no longer able to store data there reliably - either in the form of a write error (writes data, but the act isn't confirmed) or a read error (looks for data that should be there, but there's some kind of checksum error).