Re: [ale] HD Failures: bad luck or technical error??

[Michael Smith]

I am surprised you could get Redhat to install on your Maxtor drive at 
all.  I had to download a tool from Maxtor to turn on Write Verify to get 
the drives to work with Redhat 7.2....after 2 weeks of trying all kinds of 
things....

What were the exact errors you were getting?

Were the errors CRC errors?

Mike

> 
> The good news is I just updated my mian system from RH 7.1 to RH 7.2. I
> like it. Actually, I like it a lot. The latest updates to Gnome have 
> made it screamingly fast!! 
> 
> The BAD news is that my latest OS install is the 3rd one in about 18 
> months and ALL of my updates have been motivated by physical hard drive
>  failures. (If hardware failures require you to install and config a 
> system, may as well install and configure the latest and greatest.)
> 
> My hardware is a decent roll your own box... a tower case with ample
> air  space, 250w power supply, reputable Tyan mother board w/ dual IDE
> on  board, PIII 600 CPU, generous amounts of memory and a quality
> Matrox 400  AGP graphics card. All the distros I've esperimented with
> have recognized  my hardware and RH always seems to install just fine.
> My practice when  installing on a new drive is to use the Disk Druid
> tools to manually set  up seperate /, /boot, /home, /tmp, /var, /usr
> and swap partitions,  including a full format of all partitions with
> bad block checks.
> 
> About 4 months after my initial RH 6.1 install, I started getting some 
> odd errors and program crashes, ending a couple weeks later with an 
> unreadable hard drive. Maxtor replaced the 20 gig dirve under warranty 
> with an identical unit and I used the HD swap as an excuse to update to
>  RH 6.2. The 6.2 sytem was fine for another 5 months or so, then crash 
> problems started cropping up again. I now had reason to suspect the
> hard  drive, so I just went out and bought a 15 gig Western Digital at 
> RadioShack.com and upgraded to RH 7.1 in the process. (I also got the 
> dealer to exchange the Maxtor for a 15 gig Fuji and made that one a 
> mirror / backup drive for paranoia's sake.)
> 
> Things had been going good for about 8 months, then a couple weeks ago
> my  largest partition started coming up with "short read" errors which 
> reqired manual fdisk passes to restore before the system would boot. 
> Subsequently, the drive started making some loud, ominous clicking
> noises  at boot time, and eventually the disk showed up as unbootable
> (thankfully  AFTER I had time to run an up-to-date mirror to my
> "backup" drive).
> 
> So... I found a 40 gig Wester Digital 7200 for $90 at recent computer 
> fair, have dropped it in and installed RH 7.2 from a commercial CD set
> I  purchased. 
> 
> So I'm looking for opinions on what might be causing my problems.
> Am I just having a run of bad luck with these drives?? Are these low 
> priced IDE units just too cheap?? Could my MB IDE controller or some 
> obscure BIOS setting error be initiating these failures?? Am I missing 
> some special trick for formatting and partitioning?? Will the new ext3 
> file system magically solve everything??
> 
> I'd like to get to a point where I do upgrade migrations on MY
> schedule,  not the hard drive's!  Any helpful suggestions for doing
> that will be  appreciated.
> 
> peace
> (after justice)
> aaron
> 
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-- 
Michael Smith
msmith at mikeandmel.com


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sent to listmaster at ale dot org.