View Single Post
  #1  
Old January 17th 04, 04:50 PM
Bill Anderson
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default Mysterious Hard Drive Problem

Zvi Netiv wrote:

Bill Anderson wrote:


A few weeks ago I bought a Western Digital 250 Gigabyte hard drive,

for my WinXP system. I'm using it to backup my main data disk, and to
store .wav files I'm creating as I read the chapters of a book for my
father (who has macular degeneration). It seems to work fine as long as
I don't put too much data on it. But it seems that after the disk is
about half full, any new files get corrupted. Yesterday I read an
entire chapter into a .wav file, and afterward the file was filled with
moments of static.

How can this be? Do I need a new drive, or have I failed to format

my drive correctly? The data backup files still seem to be fine. But a
jpeg I created yesterday with PhotoShop and saved on the suspect drive
is definitely corrupted. When I try to open it today with PhotoShop, I
see a thumbnail just fine in the PhotoShop file-open screen, but when I
open the file itself, I see only a black screen.

When I booted the system this morning, Scandisk ran on the suspect

drive. I have no idea why it ran.

Another bit of info that may be helpful: I have three physical hard

drives in my triple-boot system. One 40 Gbyte physical drive contains
partitions for Win98, Win2K, and WinXP.



This could be the source of the problem. Apparently, the 250 GB

drive is seen
differently by W2K and XP.


One 80 Gbyte drive holds all my data files. Both of these drives are

FAT32. The third drive, the 250 Gigabyte drive, is formatted NTFS.

What's going on here? Do I need to take the drive back and get

another? Do I need to reformat my 250 Gbyte drive? Something else?



Did you try playing / viewing the recorded data without leaving the

Windows
section? If they get corrupted only after rebooting, or having

switched the
boot OS from XP to W2k, or W2K to XP, then the cause is inconsistency

between
how the drive is seen in the last two OS.
Regards, Zvi --




Thanks for helping me think this through, Zvi. I hear what you're
saying about the other OS's, but I'm reluctant to believe that's it. I
seldom use Win2K anymore -- haven't booted it in months. I use Win98
occasionally, but the default OS is WinXP and that's what I generally use.

Win98 doesn't see the NTFS drive, so I can't believe it's corrupting
individual files on it. Apparently the only files that were getting
corrupted were files added after the disk was about half full. I went
back and checked files I'd added earlier -- Word documents for example
-- and they were fine. But files I created two days ago were hopelessly
corrupt.

You've asked a good question about *when* the files became corrupted --
did it take a reboot? I just don't remember for sure. I know that when
I processed some video files onto the problem drive, they were
immediately corrupt. When I processed the same video files onto my
80-gig FAT32 drive, I had no problems at all. This problem began only
when the problem drive was about half full.

Another bit of info -- my new 250-gig hard drive is a replacement for a
120-gig hard drive that was also formatted NTFS. That drive worked just
fine in my system, right alongside Win98. I replaced it only because I
wanted a bigger drive.

I didn't FDISK this drive, and I didn't use the Western Digital floppy
that came with it to set it up. I set up the drive using WinXP -- under
Disk Management. Then I formatted it using WinXP. Disk management now
reports that the drive is healthy. I've reformatted it since all the
problems started, by the way. There's nothing on it now -- no files at
all. I'm just trying to figure out what to do next.

So the question is -- has anyone else ever seen this sort of behavior?
Can it be a bad hard drive? I can still return it for another -- I
haven't owned it very long. Is there some sort of test I can run on it
to see if part of it but not all of it is damaged? What to do, what to do?



--
Bill Anderson

I am the Mighty Favog