I have a friend with a 250GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 SATA (in a Win
XP Pro machine) that's throwing weird partition issues at the drop of
a hat.

Last week, after the PC crashed in a game, the entire drive (3 primary
NTFS partitions) became inaccessible. Partition Magic 8 showed it as
one errored partition. I could get data off any of the three
partitions with a partition recovery program, but not actually restore
the partitions themselves. I finally had to 0-out the drive and re-
partition.

Now, yesterday, a power surge during a rain storm (he really does know
better than that) it powered down, and when it came back, the first
(active) partition (this time FAT32) was showing as unformatted! (At
least the other 2 partitions are still there and Partition magic can
"see" them.)

All CHKDSK tests, Partition Magic tests, other drive checking programs
all discover no errors with the drive. (Well, once it's partitioned
and formatted).
Any ideas?
Thanks,
Liam

In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage mechphisto@gmail.com wrote:
Potential reasons:

Driver or hardware issues that cause transient problems and
prevent timely write-back of information (unlikely) or cause
writes to the wring areas. It may be faulty RAM. It may be
a faultu cache entry or the like.

What would be interesting is whether there is any other
data corruption and what its exact form is (e.g.
is there an all-zero sector or is some other data in it).

Have you looked at the SMART attributes (any other test is
really quite meaningless today) and tun a long SMART selftest?

Arno

On Apr 1, 10:43 am, Arno Wagner <m...@privacy.net> wrote:
Hmm, how does one look at SMART attributes?
I normally have SMART off at the BIOS (have read SMART can just cause
more issues than it's worth oftentimes.) If I turn it on, what tool
can I use to view the attributes?

I can do another 0'ing out of the drive. Once I do that, how can I
then check to see if indeed it wrote all 0's?

Thanks for the reply!
Liam

In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage mechphisto@gmail.com wrote:
I use the smartmontools (commandline, available on Linux
and windows). There is also a tool called "Everest", that
allows SMART access. And to just see the attributes, you can
use the current SpeedFan.

Run a long SMART selftest. It does a complete surface scan.

Arno

On Apr 1, 11:00*am, mechphi...@gmail.com wrote:
Head over to Seagate's web site and get the diagnostics for the hard
drive.

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/sup...oads/seatools/

Until the drive has been tested and found to be "ok" do not use this
drive at all. It sounds like it is failing.

smlunatick wrote:
Agreed, and for good measure, replace the sata cable. I've just thrown
out yet ANOTHER sata cable that was causing intermittent issues where
the drive would become inaccessible.

Ari

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On Apr 1, 12:37*pm, spodosaurus <spodosaurus@_yahoo_.com> wrote:
Drive not accessable is one thing. Erasure of all partition is
another and seems to indicate a big problem since the partitions are
gone but the drive still is connect (BIOS may show it.)

On Apr 1, 11:21 am, Arno Wagner <m...@privacy.net> wrote:
Easy Recovery Pro found no drive errors, including surface scan, but
it did find partition errors. (And advised to do a drive test. Hrrm.)
The Everest SMART shows OK and "passes" on all lines for the drive.
The smartctl is a bit complicated... I used "-t long" and never got a
report.
But the -H switch indicates overall self-assessment test is PASSED.
Not sure what else I can check.
I'm going to reformat the lost partition and put the OS back on...and
then test again and see if anything changes.

On Tue, 1 Apr 2008 08:02:38 -0700 (PDT), mechphisto@gmail.com put
finger to keyboard and composed:

It sounds to me like the FAT32 volume may have suffered some damage to
the FATs or to the boot sector(s). IME CHKDSK has been useless in
repairing these types of problems. Instead I've used Scandisk from
Windows 98SE to repair these faults, although in your case Win98SE
would be limited to 137GB HDs. To see the full 250GB, you would need
to install it in a USB enclosure, or possibly use Win ME's version of
Scandisk.

Whatever you do, do not be tempted to run FIXBOOT on your FAT32 volume
from the recovery console of an XP boot CD. FIXBOOT has a bug that can
fatally damage your filesystem.

See http://tinyurl.com/3334yh

Quirks in Scandisk, Chkdsk, Fixmbr, Fixboot:
http://groups.google.com/group/micro...f3f04d4f9e4925

If you are looking for a DOS based S.M.A.R.T. viewer, then I recommend
SMARTUDM (37KB):
http://www.sysinfolab.com/download.htm

Here is a sample SMARTUDM report for a Seagate HD with 119 reallocated
sectors:
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/SmartUDM/13GB.RPT

Here is a sample Smartctl report:
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/Smartctl/13gb.log

BTW, don't be alarmed by the very high numbers for Raw Read Error
Rate, Seek Error Rate, and Hardware ECC Recovered for Seagate HDs. My
own testing and research leads me to believe that these are normal and
do not in fact reflect errors.

- Franc Zabkar
--
Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.

mechphisto@gmail.com wrote:
That doesnt prove anything, post the actual report.

On Apr 1, 3:17 pm, "Rod Speed" <rod.speed....@gmail.com> wrote:
Which report?
From smartctl? If so, using what switch? The -H or the -a...?

On Tue, 1 Apr 2008 12:26:41 -0700 (PDT), mechphisto@gmail.com put
finger to keyboard and composed:

SMART can pass a disc even if it has hundreds of reallocated sectors.
Such a disc can grow new bad sectors on a regular basis. I took my
13GB Seagate drive out of service after it started doing this.

Why don't you take this opportunity to find out exactly which sectors
of the disc have been affected? I'd check the boot sector(s) and FATs.

You can use a sector editor/viewer such as Microsoft's Diskprobe which
is included on your XP CD.

How to Install the Support Tools from the Windows XP CD-ROM:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306794/EN-US/

Troubleshooting Disks and File Systems:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/l.../bb457122.aspx

- Franc Zabkar
--
Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.

mechphisto@gmail.com wrote:
The Everest SMART report. Thats why I put that just under your reference to the Everest SMART report.

Nope.

In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage mechphisto@gmail.com wrote:
You don't. You need poll with "smartctl -a <device>". May take
some hours, depending on the drive.

The "pass" on the smart attributes are sometimes over-optimistic. Can
you post the output from "smartctrl -a <device>" here?

Arno

In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage Franc Zabkar <fzabkar@iinternode.on.net> wrote:
Same here too. I believe these are from read accesses that were
started immediately after a seek and before the heads really
settled. This is fine, if the read and the ECC fails, the disk can do
a re-read with rettled heads. On writing, the disk gives the
heads more time after a seek.

Arno

smlunatick wrote:
A bad cable can mimic a lot of issues - even causing BIOS to misreport
drive size, yet the drive is still detected, etc.

Ari

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On Wed, 02 Apr 2008 11:31:22 +0800, spodosaurus
<spodosaurus@_yahoo_.com> put finger to keyboard and composed:

I've seen strange BIOS reports for PATA drives.

Here is a case where a dropped bit in a PATA cable caused a FUJITSU
MPE3102AT or MPE3102AP hard drive to be mis-detected by the BIOS as a
"BUJIP5Q IPA3102AP". Consequently a Fujitsu HD diagnostic was unable
to see the drive.

http://groups.google.com/group/micro...4?dmode=source
http://groups.google.com/group/micro...f?dmode=source

AFAICS, a serial (SATA) cable could not produce the same kind of
error. The drive would be either correctly detected or not at all.

- Franc Zabkar
--
Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.

In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage Franc Zabkar <fzabkar@iinternode.on.net> wrote:
Fascinating. But I don't see how that would corrupt the partition
table(s). Hmm. Changed bist in sector numbers for writes? But
that should also result in data corruption all over the disk.

It can be detected with error. SATA puts chscksums on all intructions
and data transfers. I had one cable that causet the disk to be
removed from the system (linux) after a few minutes, because there
the kernel got too many disk errors on access.

Arno

Franc Zabkar wrote:
I should have taken a photo last night of the salad like detection of a
WD 320GB SATAII drive that popped onto my screen during drive detection
with a 'bad' cable then It on a prior power on it didn't detect the
drive at all on one occasion.

Ari


--
spammage trappage: remove the underscores to reply
Many people around the world are waiting for a marrow transplant. Please
volunteer to be a marrow donor and literally save someone's life:
http://www.abmdr.org.au/
http://www.marrow.org/

On 2 Apr 2008 09:48:17 GMT, Arno Wagner <me@privacy.net> put finger to
keyboard and composed:

Unfortunately the OP in that thread was a technically challenged
elderly gentleman who was too afraid to open up his PC. He expected
all his hardware problems to be rectified from the keyboard. In the
end he frustrated me so much that I kill-filed him. Others persisted
but were unable to extract much useful information from him.

Anyway I believe that instead of "BUJIP5Q" he meant to write "BUJIPSQ"
which would confirm that the fault was confined to a particular bit in
a particular byte in every 16-bit word (the 1st, 5th, 7th, and 9th
bytes were faulty). As the IDE interface is 16-bit, this pointed to a
dropped bit in the cable. In fact I had seen this exact same fault in
a Quantum drive many years before. At that time the solution was to
remove and reseat the IDE cable.

FWIW, here's a personal experience that I found fascinating, but which
I was unable to fully resolve. DOS soundcard software somehow caused a
particular bit to be dropped when accessing the HD.

OPTi 82C931 sound card problems:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp....4?dmode=source

Then how do you explain spodosaurus's observations?

- Franc Zabkar
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