Funny HDD behavior

randomcow

November 14, 2006 10:43:02 PM

I have an HDD that's been acting funny lately. When I boot my PC from off state the drive is not detected and bios gives me a "no system disk error". However if I restart after a cold start the drive is detected and behaves normally. Other HDDs were tested under the same condition including another of the same model but none have this problem.

Another interesting point is that the this problem only occurs when the drive is set to single or master (yes its an IDE drive). Lastly the drive formats fine and passes all of the manufacturer's tests.

My question is what is going on and should I avoid storing critical data on this drive? The drive is old so RMA is not an option.

Thanks.

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CompTIA_Rep

November 15, 2006 5:23:17 PM

Is the drive on the end of the ribbon cable when set to master?

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randomcow

November 16, 2006 1:48:06 AM

Sorry I wasn't clear -

I have my drives in removable trays so they are all set to cable select. From my observation this one particular drive fails to boot whenever it is connected as master (on the end of the ribbon cable). I haven't tried setting the drive pin configuration to either master/single or slave.
Also the trays don't seem to be the problem either - I have tried swapping these already.

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dokk

November 16, 2006 9:49:41 AM

Quote:

I have an HDD that's been acting funny lately. When I boot my PC from off state the drive is not detected and bios gives me a "no system disk error". However if I restart after a cold start the drive is detected and behaves normally. Other HDDs were tested under the same condition including another of the same model but none have this problem.

Another interesting point is that the this problem only occurs when the drive is set to single or master (yes its an IDE drive). Lastly the drive formats fine and passes all of the manufacturer's tests.

My question is what is going on and should I avoid storing critical data on this drive? The drive is old so RMA is not an option.

Thanks.

Yeah I had a drive that acted like that a Western Digital 160 could not get it set up as a primary master no matter what I did,I too use removable caddys,so finally I wound up using it as a standard drive with no primary partition on it at all until it went snafu ,then I rma'd it..Now then to your situation,IF you can ZERO the whole drive and if you have fdisked /MBR and it still snafu's,you might want to consider using it as a data drive only,one other thing,,if you have either Spinrite,or Norton Ghost,either of these will act up & find bad blocks[norton]/analyse & refuse to examine [spinrite] the drive in question even when the maker's software says it is good to go.
One more thing,a friend of mine recently told me that he could not get a maxtor hdd to work in any way shape or form with any other hdd in the same system ???and he is no new bee .
Bottom line if you are still worried abot the drive then ,,,1.Do Not use it as a primary,and 2 Of course do not put anthing on it that you can Not Afford to loose and so on..Do not mean to preach but sometimes we nave to remind ourselves of the obvious...Let us know how you get on.EH ????...

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