Malfunctioning Brand NEw IBM Hard Drive

leeroybrown

I recently bought a load of computer parts from www.scan.co.uk

One of these items was as follows:

61.5Gb IBM Deskstar 60GXP ATA-100 (8.5ms 2MB Cache 7200rpm)


This was bought on the order as a favour to a friend who knew someone who needed a new HDD.

I gave the HDD to my friend, who installed it in his system and tested it by transferring 12Gig of mp3's onto it then off again (from his own HDD).

He then removed the HDD from his case and brought it to his friends house where they installed it again. This time the drive wouldn't work (Couldn't be seen by any software / OS) but was still showing up properly in the BIOS.

I was also tested back in the original test machine and in another one afterwards where it also didn't work.

To make matters worse the machine it was intended for has one of those pressure retaining systems for the drives (not screws) so the case scratched the sides of the HDD while being installed/removed.

Now I am going to have to get a replacement drive for one that has visible signs of scratching.

I presume there is no was I can fix the drive (and think a replacement would be a good idea anyway), but I'm just wondering if anyone has any idea what is wrong with the drive.

And before anyone suggests it, the jumper settings were properly configured for the drive for each installation.

gandalf

I remember reading somewhere (could have been the register) that the 60GB Deskstar is having problems, althou the 40GB is appartently fine ??

Gandalf.

leeroybrown

My main worry now iss getting the blasted thing replaced.

Hopefully the 40.1 Gig Deskstar is OK, as I have bought one of them myself recently.

beaver

They won't assume you bought the harddrive to leave it in the anti-static bag. It was bought to be used, no? During the course of it's legitimate use, the sides got scratched. Big deal!

It's ****ed. Send it back.

tribble

IBM (GX(P)) hardisc's have known problems

i posted this yesterday in relation to another question

I have 2 IBM hard disk's - 1 x 30 gig 7200rpm udma 100 (1 year old) and 1x 60 gig 7200rpm udma 100 (one week old)

the 30 gig is already reporting hard errors ( scandisk and ibm official software can't fix them ) and it makes a very loud scraping noise when trying to read the bad sectors.
that said i haven't lost any data and no more errors have occoured since the first lot.
only the other day i saw this

http://slashdot.org/askslashdot/01/10/04/0050238.shtml

(look at the links in the article)

i have never had any hard disk failures before and i own c. 25 hard disks (from 20mg! (2x!!) > 60 gig) - except for one 20mg segate which died after it fell down the stairs (but not before i copied the data off it) - so this failure after 1 year has me worried...

if you want preformance (though not reliability) choose IBM they are the fastest of any of my HD's

JustHalf

Those would be the 75GXP's, tribble

Gerry

The 75GXP have known problems, the 60GXP seem relatively trouble free.

Your quoted post is not relevant here, as 75gxp disks don't just die, as seems to be the case here, they develop bad sectors. I know because I have a 45 gig 75GXP drive myself, with similar symptoms to your 30 gig one.

So between being taken out of one machine, and going into the other, the drive must have recieved some shock, either physical or electrical, because they don't just die for no reason...

po0k

I'm gonna take a wild stab in the dark, and try and save you a bit of hassle.....
The machine it was tested in, with the 12Gigs of MP3s, it ran WinNT/2000 or something with NFTS?
Then the drive was put in a Win9x system?
Win9x can't read NFTS directly, it uses FAT32 (win98/win98SE/WinME?/WinXP?) or FAT16 (Win95 OSRxxx).
This is just something to consider.

Not having used or installed WinME or XP yet i can't say whether they're FAT32 or NFTS.
ASk your man who you got the drive for. Eoin wasn't it?
Also, on a side note, if IBMs are the fastest performing, Maxtor's most dodgey then what is the most reliable drive manufacturer?
I ask cos I might be geting another drive soon.

tribble

The 75GXP have known problems, the 60GXP seem relatively trouble free.

true, true... so far

i own both a Deskstar 75GXP (30 gig) and a Deskstar 60GXP (60gig) -
the 75 is fu><ed and i'm damned if i trust the 60 - it's probably okay but i just don't know...

IBM harddisks have a built in saftey ramp to protect from damage in transit - so physical stress is probably not your problem.

electrical shock is possible even probable

also,
check the jumpers at the back of the drive - you'll have somthing like 16 of them (i'm not at home so i can't check) - one might have fallen off

btw
Win XP is NTFS 5.1- a minor change from win2k
see http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/17783.html

Praetorian

IBM.... Their drives seem to be giving a lot of trouble

Espeicially the 40GB 7200rpm (according to overclocker.co.uk forums)

Im definitely vulnerable. Checkout my machine's hard drives:

1 x 75 GIG IBM 7200rpm
2 x 40 GIG IBM 7200rpm in raid 1

leeroybrown

Well to the best of my knowledge the disk was re-tried in the original test system when they found it was not working.

And anyway, regardless of what format a disk is in, if the BIOS picks it up properly shouldn't you be able to detect it for the purposes of formatting.

leeroybrown

Now heres a more accurate sequence of events:

1. Drive is placed in a Win ME system as a a "slave" drive.

2. The drice was formatted as FAT32 using FDISK

3. 12 Gigs of mp3's were transferred onto it. (Used as backup during install of Win2k)

4. The primary hard disk was reformatted (NTFS) and Win2k pro was installed on it.

5. the mp3's were re-transferred back onto the primary disk.

6. (This is where my informatiuon becomes a bit sketchy, as I'm not that expert on fdisk, partitions or formatting.)
FDISK was used to remove the partition. (second hand information)

7. Dirve moved to the intended target PC where it did not work.


I hope my friend did not do any dodgy chnging to the drive when he removed the partition. IU presume that the HDD should be re-formattable.

Does anyone know what might have happened, if its fixable, or if the hdd would be replaced if some kind of feck up occurred?

(I want to have my storyright before I e-mail them about returning it.)

T'would be an expensive mistake.

Das Kitty

I have the 40.1GB Deckstar and its grand (although I've formatted it 4 times now, damn OS indecisiveness). I bought it from www.dabs.co.uk which I found excellent and couldn't reccomend highly enough, they also gave me 128MB of RAM for free with my order. Toppin' or what?

po0k

I'd imagine the problem lies in the deleting of the partition, though you did just tell me that the data was corrupted/corrupted the primary (Win2k) disk when transferring it back.

I'm going to take the drive home tonight and try it on my Machine, in slave mode.
There are 8jumper pins, and about 16 different configs for them.
I'll give it a whirl.
You want Win9x on it don't you?
FAT32 it is so

leeroybrown

Syxer:

As far as I know the information on the primary drive of ther second PC where it was installed was corrupted. I'm not sure what kind of messing they were doing at the time, and as far as I know the drive was to be used with Win ME (FAT32) on that machine.

I'll send the mail to scan tech support and give you the drive later.

po0k

the drive makes noisey clicking. Sonds like it's FUBAR.

Leeroy's sending it back.
Pity.

leeroybrown

Thanks Syxer


Looks like its gonna have to go back.

Has anyone else here sent anything back to scan.co.uk before?

Their phone system doesn't work (infinite loop), and they havn't replied to either of my support e-mails yet.