[ale] harddrive errors

[Chris Farris]

The 250G drive I bought last summer when Frys open started tossing the
same errors last weekend. I'll never trust it again with vital data (I'm
an unforgiving a-hole) but I hate to just toss it. I want to put it in a
USB/Firewire enclosure and use it for swapping mp3s. 

Anyone know if running the lowlevel format tools will mark the new bad
areas and allow this drive to be used again.

Thanks
Chris

On Sun, 2005-06-05 at 11:48, James P. Kinney III wrote:
> On Sun, 2005-06-05 at 11:22 -0400, John Wells wrote:
> > James P. Kinney III said:
> > > 1. Did you replace the IDE cable with a brand new, un-mangled one? IDE
> > > cables have very fine wires that can't take being bent around much. The
> > > 80 wire cables are quite fragile. They feel stiff mostly because of the
> > > insulation. I believe the wire inside are around 30 gauge.
> > 
> > Ok...the IDE cable does appear a bit mangled, so I'm going to replace. 
> > Power supply (350W) should be adequate.
> > 
> > After replacing the cable, how can I stress test it to see if any more
> > errors occur?
> 
> Boot from a CD or floppy like Toms RootBoot or Knoppix. Generate a large
> file (if you use Knoppix, copy the compressed image file to the hard
> drive) and make another copy of it from the hard drive file. This will
> force the system to do both reads and writes and exercise the head
> motion with lots of Seeks. While you do this, have a shell open tailing
> the systemlog file.
> > 
> > Thanks!
> > John
> > 
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