[Thinkpad] MS software killed my drive ??

[Aryeh Goretsky]

Hello,

Recently, someone on the list mentioned it was possible to damage a hard
disk drive's by not providing it with enough power--what could be called
an "under-amperage" condition, I guess.  Could it be that the USB 2.0 to
3.5"-2.5" powered adapter did not provide sufficient power (amps) to the
IBM TravelStar 2.5" 2.1GB 17mm high hard disk drive, causing it to fail?

The other thing to consider is that judging from the form-factor and the
capacity of the hard disk drive it is an older model.  Hard disk drives,
floppy disk drives and optical disk drives all contain mechanical parts,
which will fail.  Sometimes the failure occurs in a predictable fashion,
and sometimes less so.  It may have simply been this disk drive's time.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky


At 10:00 AM 2/7/2007, you wrote:

>Message: 1
>Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2007 15:34:20 -0500
>From: Mark Gardiner <100550.3170 at compuserve.com>
>Subject: [Thinkpad] MS software killed my drive ??
>To: "thinkpad at stderr" <thinkpad at stderr.org>
>Message-ID: <200702061534_MC3-1-DA83-3C75 at compuserve.com>
>Content-Type: text/plain;       charset=ISO-8859-1
>
>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