What is it with me and harddisks?

[Buleste]

Thats where you went wrong. Alzhiemers and Parkinsons are terminal diseases where as Downs is a perfectly livable genetic disorder. Your hard drives are just living up to their names. Alzhiemers probably started by losing information and Parkinsons just got slower and slower until it gave up.

You don't need to insult your hard drives by giving them funney names. Windows is the biggest insult you can give a HDD.

[Harrison]

Does anyone know of any decent HD recovery software? Does that boot CD in the sticky have any for example?

Yes it does, but I would now also recommend another boot CD called Hirens 9.3. It is a really good recovery CD with a load of useful software on it. I've got the ISO and it isn't too large so will upload it to the server for you later and PM you once it is there.

If this has been happening to you in three different PCs, each with different PSUs, I would guess it may be a problem with voltage spikes. Do you have a surge protector?

No I don't. It shouldn't strictly be necessary here, our power grids hold a fairly high standard. High spikes like that shouldn't be occuring. It may be worth looking into still, so thanks for the suggestion.

I would definitely recommend getting a Belkin surge protector as they come with surge protection insurance starting at cover for $100,000 for the cheapest models. One of my PC's PSU's was destroyed by a power spike two years ago and that even had a cheap surge protector fitted.

[J T]

Must be your sheer animal *ahem* magentism

Also, what a shocker.

[Bloodwych]

You've been exceptionally unlucky to have so many hard drive failures - too many for them all just to happen by natural causes.

Hard drives are, except in exceptional circumstances or problem models (anyone remember certain IBM "death"stars?), fairly reliable devices unless you start chucking them around your room. They normally don't just die either, but slowly walk their way to death usually by first making some clicking and chunking sounds and/or spewing out bad sectors.

Something must be causing the failures. Any common denominators between the three systems that you've had failures on? Have all your failures just been from working to dead, no in-between?

Sometimes, it's something not obvious that's causing the issues. I had two hard drive failures and instantly thought strangeness was afoot. It turned out to be the molex power connectors - my last hard drives must have had slightly larger connectors, or the metel in the plug had expanded under use.

Regardless of the reasons, the hard drives weren't receiving enough current to work reliably and gave all kinds of detection issues, appearing dead. Replaced the molex plugs with tighter contacts and all the problems went away.

[Teho]

Yes it does, but I would now also recommend another boot CD called Hirens 9.3. It is a really good recovery CD with a load of useful software on it. I've got the ISO and it isn't too large so will upload it to the server for you later and PM you once it is there.

That'd be great if you would. I've now had a look at the one in the sticky topic and while there are many nice apps there they are mostly for managing, partitioning and so on. A few errorchecking apps existed, but offered little towards recovering anything. I did get to do a scan of the drive though, and it read the whole thing without finding a single bad sector. So the drive is fine, with a messed up filesystem obviously. Probably happened when the system drive crashed and everything grinded to a halt, as the files I was seeding were stored on it it was constantly being read from. So if only I can find an app that can do a decent job of restoring the filesystem, all should be well. Hopefully.

As for surge protectors, I don't know. I haven't had a lot of failures with any other electrical appliances. The chip fan on my motherboard went just some months ago, but if you google asus+a8n+chip+fan you'll quickly see that this is a fairly common problem with these boards. Was relatively easily fixed, just switched it for a heatsink and its temp has been fine ever since. I say relatively, as the fan was fastened with these plastic clips from underneath the mobo, so had to take the PC apart and get the board out just to get the fan loose.

But the point is, I'm not exactly plagued with things failing on me. Except the harddrives. If I had a problem with power surges here, I should see more things failing on me. No, I'm willing to still just write it off as bad luck. They do see a lot of use after all, my system is always on and due to filesharing the harddrives are being almost constantly accessed. I do hope it'll be awhile till one fails again though, it's starting to be annoying.

Any common denominators between the three systems that you've had failures on? Have all your failures just been from working to dead, no in-between?

The first two drives that's crashed on me had started to get bad sectors and cyclic redundancy errors before they kicked the bucket. One of them I just formatted and used again, and it worked for over a year before going in the same manner. It's only this time actually that it happened without any warning.

And no, there really aren't any common denominators between the systems I've had. When I built this one for example, I upgraded everything. Same with the last one, actually. In fact it was only the harddrives that I salvaged from the old system both times. As for power, I was very conscious about getting the right PSU for it. With the hardware I initially got, I only required a 400W. So I got a 500W so I could add more hardware to the system later without getting power issues.

I guess the only other common denominator is that this system and the previous one was both built on Asus boards. The first PC I had was a Targa model, and to be honest I don't know if they used their own mobos or licensed them from someone else. It's been too long, I've no idea today which board was in it.

[Bloodwych]

Well it's a difficult one to track down going by what you've said, apart from relating it to power source issues as others have mentioned. Usually only the PSU actually blowing out would potentially cause damage to PC components as most should have a basic ability to smooth out spikes.

I hope you get it sorted as that isn't a nice problem to be faced with. Here is an article on Power Supplies and protection:

http://www.informit.com/articles/art...seqNum=14&rl=1

Of course, it may not be your problem at all as we're all just clutching at straws.

I think I mentioned in another thread, that I've personally been exceptionally lucky with computer equipment. I've never had a failure except for basic things like CR2032 batteries. Even my good old AMD 586 rig that got loads of abuse still worked, before it got scrapped! My brother has an old PIII 800 rig with a 20GB 7200rpm Quantum hard drive that's had even more abuse, but it still soldiers on and it's never had surge protection and only uses a cheap PSU.

[Harrison]

As I often repair PCs for people I've seen a lot of PC issues over the years, but as Bloodwych said, it is normally only a faulty PSU that has ever killed an HD instantly. Normally they show signs of failing for ages with bad sector read errors or cyclic redundancy check errors. The only HD I've ever had that did die without warning was my first A1200 3.5" HD. It just wouldn't boot one day and made lots of clicking sounds.

[Sharingan]

FOOK.

My harddisk died on me too. No warnings, no nothing. Just a few clicks of death, followed by a total lockup.

I've got my stuff backed up, but I'm not looking forward to installing everything from scratch (I don't have an image of my system drive). Just locating all the drivers and crap is going to take me a day.

Oh well. The drive served me well for like 6-7 years, so ... R.I.P. 16 january 2008, 17:46.

[Buleste]

My PC's still got my first PC's 9GB system disk in form 9 or 10 years ago and it's till going well (touch wood).

[Stephen Coates]

My HD from 1999 contains my OS and is accessed everyday and has never shown any signs of failing. Hopefully it won't in the near future.