Hard drive may be dying.

[blade47]

I have a very old 10gig drive that I was using to store downloaded programs and other various files. A couple of months ago I started having an odd problem where the 10 gig and a 200 gig drive on the same ide channel would become inaccessible and disappear from My Computer.

I removed the 10gig and haven't had anymore problems with disappearing drives. My first thought was the 10gig was dying and causing strange problems. According to the smart status it's fine. Is there anyway to stress test or some sort of diagnostic tool that could help determine for certain if the drive is dying?

Not that it's worth anything, but I would hate to toss it in the junk bin if it could still be used in an old beater for web browsing and email.

 

[Cr0nJ0b]

Toss it and move on. It's probably not even worth the time to trouble shoot the issue. If I had to guess I'd say that your HD is throwing DMA errors or some such that your IDE controller isn't liking...there are some drive test tools that you could run...but in my experience with old drives, when things start to go wrong they go bad fast.

BACKUP anything that you don't want to lose.

 

[Boyo]

I second that. Back everything up and move on. A 10gb HD isn't worth trying to save. If it's going bad, there is nothing you could really do to save it. Once they go bad, they will die sooner rather than later.

 

[blade47]

Thanks for the replies. For me it's always worth the time to troubleshoot if there is any hope because I enjoy messing around with that sort of thing. I was just curious if the drive was actually going bad or not. I dropped it in another machine and it ran for a week without issue. If everyone is certain it's the drive and not some odd incompatibility between the drives or controller then I guess it's not worth spending any time on it. I had only been using it in the new server for a few weeks went I noticed the problem so I'm not sure if it had been going on all along or not.

 

[John]

http://pcsupport.about.com/od/diagnosticsoftware/tp/tophddiag.htm

http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

I wish I had a few 10gb drives for the crack rack. Too bad it isn't up right now. On topic, however, the last time I had hard drives disappearing it was a PSU issue...

 

[Seekermeister]

Since the problem effect both harddrives on the same cable at the same time, I would tend to suspect the cable, either the connection itself, or a bad wire within it. I have had a similar problem, and simply moving the cable around solved it.