hi all

at work i have i small pc, where people copy their backups to. the program we use does a straight archive bit copy, nothing funny. the backup drive is the secondary master, i run an 80gb for the OS...

everything seemed fine, i bought a new 250GB drive and the backups went on there, no problem.

Then, 4 days ago i saw that some of the files on the drive are "corrupted and unreadable". i restarted the pc, and the whole disk said "not formatted"...

i used an app that rewrote the boot record, so i could at least get most of the data off the drive. then i formatted the drive again as NTFS, and put in back. next day, same thing happened...

I have another 250gb drive, so i then put that one into the computer, and guess what, the same thing happened.

I now suspect that the PC is the cause of the trouble. I also tried to copy a CD to another harddrive on the pc, and it said it was gonna take 2 hours, and after 2 minutes, i got a CRC error. the cd is fine.

now i convinced my boss to get a new, proper pc to replace this one, but i'm afraid when i get the pc, i might have overlooked something and the new one does the same.

are there any possible causes anyone can think of? why this might be happening? the drives are both brand new, the current pc has been working fine for the last 3 years. it runs windows 2000 server.

any help appreciated... thanks!
TBlaar

how long has this system run under its current install?

its possible that the program is messed up some how and its not backing up properly... I would do a comlplete system wipe and start from scratch...

It would help to know what OS and Service Pack (if any) you are using.

Run CHKDSK /R on the drive. Run manufacturer's diagnostic and DFT from IBM/Hitachi

Mike.

a sagging power circuit in that office that is overloaded or weak power supply in the PC can kill your hard drives. When your power sags the heads crash on the platter surface and physically destroy and corrupt your data eventually killing the drive completely.

Maybe a VIA chipset?

SiS chipset, have done chkdsk /r and LOTS of other testing apps, find no problems. pc has been running for 3 years working fine, Windows 2000 Server, not too sure about what SP, but it updates often.

the Power thing is a problem though, as Cape Town has been having MASSIVE rolling blackouts for the last few months. this is when it started.

but the new drive i put in the pc, hasn't had a blackout, and yet it does the same. could one of the other parts, like mb, ram, cpu be damaged, and that's why the writing to the drive becomes corrupt?

thanks for all the help!

Could be memory, run Memtest86 overnight.

Mike.