Re: This is an interesting problem!

[Jeff Licquia <jeff@licquia.org>]

On Sat, 2002-06-01 at 20:50, Travis Davies wrote:
> Ok, tell me if this sounds familiar to you. I got a
> computer running windows.

There's your first problem. :-)

> The drive is 2.5 gigs (old).
> It is known that the drive has some bad clusters. so
> one the drive can't be detected.

Maybe I'm misled, but I've always been under the impression that drive
detection had more to do with the firmware on the drive and less to do
with the condition of the platters.  OTOH, the firmware may be freaking
if it can't line sectors up right on the platters.

> I tried to reboot and
> the drive is detected but will not make it past DOS.
> My opinion was that the drive was starting to crap
> out.

That's probably true; the drive is untrustworthy.  To play devil's
advocate, however, it may be possible that a particular strategic part
of the drive is all that's bad.  If you have a utility that will check
the drive for bad blocks and will write a bad block table to the disk,
you may be able to get it to work again, at least partially.

> So, I remove the drive and place this soon to be
> garbage drive in another computer that has always
> worked very well for me, and set this drive as primary
> slave. I boot the machine and it finds the primary
> drive(the one that was already in the bax) and after a
> minute it finally finds the primary slave (the drive
> with the problems). It boots up regularly. I look at
> the troubled drive in explorer and it seems corrupted
> beyond repair. So i shut the machine down I remove the
> the trouble drive(primary slave) and reboot. Now The
> drive that was already the machine (the good one)
> can't be detected. So Now I am stuck with two drives
> that won't work. Have any of you ever heard of
> anything like this?

Did you switch any of the jumper settings on the good drive and forget
to switch them back?

This being a Linux list, I'll assume you know Linux.  It might be
instructive to boot the drive(s) under Linux for analysis.  Windows and
Linux drivers will be tolerant of different kinds of faults, and there's
some anecdotal evidence to suggest that Linux will be more tolerant in
general.  Plus, Linux drivers tend to spew lots of diagnostic
information when things go south, while Windows drivers silently fail or
drop small cryptic messages in the event log (if you're running an NT
derivative, such as W2K or XP).

As for why Windows won't recognize your good disk anymore: Who knows? 
Try re-detecting the drive in your BIOS setup.  Check your BIOS boot
parameters.  Make sure there aren't any floppies or CDs in any drives. 
Try booting from a Linux install CD and see if the installer recognizes
the disks.


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