New Drives = Bad Sectors...

[nameless]

Situation:
I'm running an 'old' Athlon 800 / WinME
Recently I went to add another hard drive (seagate 20gb 7200) within a month it developed bad sectors. i replaced it under warranty with a second one.. same results with the second. i went with a Fujitsu 40gb 7200 FDB. This lasted me a month before bad sectors developed...
Question:
Is this something that i've done wrong? the technicians at the store i've been dealing with are giving me a story of either its my 'old' equipment and 'new' technology or that i'm doing something wrong. problem is i've swapped in and Fdisked 3 other odler Seagate and Maxtor drives all of which have been running perfectly.
is this just a stroke of bad luck? or am i just incapable of installing a new hard drive properly?

 

[markprz]

Unless your motor skills don't extend to the level of using a screwdriver and plugging in an IDE cable, I doubt it's your fault. Blaming the consumer for the manufacturer's screwups is nothing new with hard disks. IBM technical support still blame people for their 75GXPs failing.

 

[Crashman]

Sometimes good sectors are mislabled bad, this is often caused by low quality chipsets, and I don't know how, only that I've seen it happen quite often. I once had a VIA motherboard that would cause misread sectors about once a month, and I was able to recover all of them (except the data on them was corrupted). Since this always resulted in corrupt data, I would recover the mislabled sectors by repartioning the drive.

What's the frequency, Kenneth?

 

[nameless]

Interesting, it is a VIA board i'm running. I have not tryied to repartioning the drive as they were covered under warranty!
Can you suggest a chipset that may not cause this problem?

Thanks for the input guys

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by nameless on 06/19/02 10:51 AM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[PCcashCow]

sometimes running a debug command to wipe out all the low level junk the manufacturer put on there, followed by a format. might work. also try support via partition magic?

It seems that every time I reboot my wallet get smaller.

 

[Crashman]

Well, some companies have been able to minimize the problem with BIOS updates, have you tried the latest BIOS on your board? Remember that chances are, unless a low level test shows the sectors are bad, they are probably just mislabled. Also some versions of the VIA 4-in-1 driver are not as stable as others.

If BIOS and Drivers don't help, you MIGHT replace the board, I usually recommend SiS chipset boards (for about a year now, since SiS got good). The only problem there is that the good SiS boards only support DDR SDRAM.

ECS has the K7S5A that supports both memory types, but has a higher than normal rate of bad boards, and cannot tolerate noisy power (meaning you need a quality power supply to make it stable). Although the bad boards are covered under warranty, most people don't want to risk the time involved.

What's the frequency, Kenneth?