[Thinkpad] MS software killed my drive ??

[STeve Andre']

On Tuesday 06 February 2007 15:34:20 Mark Gardiner wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I have really all but given up on this HDD problem, but thought I'd air the
> issue here in case its been come across before because it perplexes me!!
>
> I was moving data around a series of older FAT 32  IDE 2.5" drives to
> relieve one for a specific task and was using a combination of both my
> 760ED and T23 with their 2ndHDD adapters and a useful USB2.0-3.5"-2.5"
> powered adapter.
>
> The drive in question - an old 2.1Gb Travelstar, 17mm jobbie, had been
> running fine in its previous setup, and I wanted to remove a lot of
> extraneous old data/apps leaving the OS in place to make life simpler than
> all the F'disking/formatting answering all MS's install routine questions
> for over an hour!!!. Previously it was running in the 760.
>
> I had it connected via the USB adapter to the T23 running XP Pro and was
> doing fine, when after about 20 mins of deleting it started to throw up
> error messages such as 'Source diectory not found'. So I ran the error
> checker under Tools and it did find lost clusters, so to cut short the
> effort, I popped it back into the 760 as the master and it powered but
> wouldn't boot cleanly revealing errors. So I booted up from a W98 bootdisk
> and ran scandisk and ellected to fix errors. BUT on reboot, the drive
> didn't power at all... ??
>
> I have tried fitting it to all sorts of other machines and it is totally
> dead - no power... I could understand a disk error resulting from this
> activity, but for it to be totally killed by disk housekeeping software???
> It just goes to show that MS software isn't compatible with itself at
> all...
>
> Any thoughts??
>
> Cheers
>
> Mark
> UK

Sure, the disk is old, and in touching some set of sectors that hadn't
been in a while (which had errors), all hell broke loose when you did
that.  Or, moving the head around a lot caused a mechanical problem
to crop up.  I just had a 120G disk die on me.  I'd gotten a soft error
on a single sector and knew it was time to get data off the disk.  When
doing a tar of the disk to scoop everything off, the drive stopped 
working and in fact kills the IDE bus on my thinkpad.

Old disks can do strange things.  New ones can too, but the older a
disk is the more ah, flavourful the problems can be.  Accessing all
of a disk that has problems on it often results in this kind of stuff.

You *MAY* get the drive back for a bit by not using it for several
hours, and cooling it down before using it.  I stuff disks in the
freezer here at work (with people wondering if I am now eating
computers) for a few minutes, and then try using it again.  It 
often fails, but I've had a couple of great successes by doing that.

This is why backups are wonderful.

--STeve Andre'