Convoluted hard drive problems - a diary

[Dorian Gray]

Someone gave me a HP Pavilion 751n. It had some kind of hard drive problem that caused the boot up to SMART warn me that the drive was at imminent failure. It's a Maxtor with 80GB. It only had around 10gb being used, so I had this plan to take a 30gb Quantum Fireball, format it, image copy the Maxtor, and run from the Quantum, then either fix the Maxtor and reverse the above, or just use the Maxtor for storage (they're both 5400 speed). The Quantum was partitioned into roughly 3gb and 27gb (for an old Compaq), and those showed up as different drives. Fine - I formatted them as NTFS drives. Then I went to copy the Maxtor and discovered that it had some funky partition that wasn't a partition, in that the part of the drive that was C was in FAT32, but the bulk of the rest was in NTFS. They are on the same drive somehow - I didn't think that was possible. So you'd think I'd just reformat the small partition to take the small FAT32, right? Well, the small FAT32 section is around 5gb, while the small partition is 3gb as I said. I have a lot of options:
1) repartition the Quantum and reformat, then image copy - but I don't know if that will work
2) keep using the crappy drive and hitting F2 every time I boot up, ignoring the crash warning
3) format them both, use this 95 disk I have, then upgrade with this 98 disk I have, then buy an XP upgrade copy, or
4) Do 3 with a completely new drive.

Complicating the whole thing is that this has an uber-powerful 150V power supply, and I just got a new 256mb nvidia 5200 for this (didn't deserve more, but deserved more than the 64mb onboard). Everything works great until it gets hot unless I keep the case door off.

Does anyone have any kind of useful suggestion using only what I already have? Or if not, the cheapest solution possible?

[WildCat]

Does anyone have any kind of useful suggestion using only what I already have? Or if not, the cheapest solution possible?
Hard drives are dirt cheap now, why not just throw a new one in and add another cooling fan to the case if there's a spot for it? Hell, here's a 30GB Western Digital for $15: http://shopper.cnet.com/hard-drives/western-digital-caviar-wd300ab/4014-3186_9-4544850.html

[Dorian Gray]

I know hard drives are cheap, but getting a new hard drive means buying Windows XP, which is $90. Total cost with your suggestion: $105. I'm looking for a solution that involves using the hard drives I have, solving the problem with partitions, copying, free software, whatever.

Actually, if I got Windows XP I'd just format both drives and install it.

[Zep]

HD makers expect a certain percentage of drives to (1) be DOA, or (2) fail in relatively short order. It's cheaper to keep churning them out at speed than to slow down for extreme QA weeding. That said, the quality level for your dollar is usually quite high for most HD products.

SMART drives at imminent failure will be nothing but trouble in future. That condition means hardware problems. Repartitioning and reformatting will not help improve this. So plan NOT to rely on the Maxtor for anything. It may run for years, or it may not survive until Easter.

Use the Quantum drive as your system disk and so on. Then mount the Maxtor as a slave drive and get anything off it you would like, then reformat it, etc. I would be tempted to use it for holding CD and DVD images (games, movies, etc), especially if you are loading an iPod or running iTunes or something like that. You can always recover that content if you have the original source media, so it matters not if the thing craps out unexpectedly. Annoying but hardly critical. Meanwhile, 80GB instant access is rather handy for that sort of thing!

[CORed]

I would suggest gettting a live linux CD (Knoppix, Sidux and Ubuntu are good ones) that contains a program called Gparted. this will let you create, delete, and resize partitions to your heart's conent. As others have said, the drive giving you SMART warnings is probably trash. Don't use it for anything you don't want to lose. The FAT32 partition is a partition. It just has a "Partition type" number that Windows doesn't recognize. It probably has some DOS based diagnostic utilities on it. A word of warning. If you image copy Windows XP to a partition that starts on a different hard drive sector than it was originally installed on, it probably won't boot. It is possible to fix this, but it will be easiest to partition the new drive the same as your old. BTW, you can image copy your XP to a new hard drive.

For copying your images, use ntfsclone, or dd.

[Wally]

Someone gave me a HP Pavilion 751n. It had some kind of hard drive problem that caused the boot up to SMART warn me that the drive was at imminent failure. It's a Maxtor with 80GB. It only had around 10gb being used, so I had this plan to take a 30gb Quantum Fireball, format it, image copy the Maxtor, and run from the Quantum, then either fix the Maxtor and reverse the above, or just use the Maxtor for storage (they're both 5400 speed). The Quantum was partitioned into roughly 3gb and 27gb (for an old Compaq), and those showed up as different drives. Fine - I formatted them as NTFS drives. Then I went to copy the Maxtor and discovered that it had some funky partition that wasn't a partition, in that the part of the drive that was C was in FAT32, but the bulk of the rest was in NTFS. They are on the same drive somehow - I didn't think that was possible. So you'd think I'd just reformat the small partition to take the small FAT32, right? Well, the small FAT32 section is around 5gb, while the small partition is 3gb as I said. I have a lot of options:
1) repartition the Quantum and reformat, then image copy - but I don't know if that will work
2) keep using the crappy drive and hitting F2 every time I boot up, ignoring the crash warning
3) format them both, use this 95 disk I have, then upgrade with this 98 disk I have, then buy an XP upgrade copy, or
4) Do 3 with a completely new drive.

Complicating the whole thing is that this has an uber-powerful 150V power supply, and I just got a new 256mb nvidia 5200 for this (didn't deserve more, but deserved more than the 64mb onboard). Everything works great until it gets hot unless I keep the case door off.

Does anyone have any kind of useful suggestion using only what I already have? Or if not, the cheapest solution possible?

I may have an answer for you. I think the small odd partition on the Quantum drive is an install version of windows.


Install the Quantum drive as the primary drive
power up the pc and hit F12 ( or some other F)during post.
you should then see an option to do a clean reinstall of some version of windows.

If you have the model number of the pc the drive was in originally, you may be able to search for a manual and get the exact info.

[Dorian Gray]

Wally, you are 100% correct with the info you had available. I have already formatted that drive, though, and the Windows version was 95. I was going to try to copy everything from the bad drive to the good one, then run the computer from the good one and format the bad one and use it for storage as suggested above.

The problem is that I can't seem to copy the files (the image, whatever) from the bad drive to the good one. There are errors each time I try. Either it's too far gone (yet it runs XP and IE well), or it's something I'm doing. Since there are two different file types on each drive (FAT32 and NTFS), one partitioned mysteriously and one partitioned with two drive letters, and the sizes of the small partition on each drive are of different sizes, at this point I'm assuming it's me and I just don't know enough.

I know SMART imminent failure warnings = bad, and I know I have CDs enough to get a new drive to Windows 98. I know it's annoying, and I know that a Vundo trojan on the only computer I haven't messed with in the past few weeks was a kick-me-while-I'm-down diversion I could have done without.

If my 4 computers were hairdos, they'd be Blagojevich, Trump and Traficant, with my wife's computer being Jennifer Aniston.