Steve said:
I've got a hard drive that's getting flakey.
The BIOS recognizes the drive, but Windows XP doesn't see the drive.
For a short while today, I could see the drive and was able to copy some
data off it. I'm guessing the drive is on it's last legs, and am trying
to grab the data and retire the drive. It sounds fine, but I'm guessing
it must have some physical heat damage so the software recovery programs
won't help (I'm guessing). It's a western digital caviar 120G drive.
The other drives work fine.
I don't know if this is related, but my power supply now beeps four
times when I turn the hard power switch on. It boots the system fine
and doesn't beep at all when I start it using the power button on the PC.
Windows XP
2.5G Ram
3 Hard Drives (120G, 120G, 160G)
Ultra Power Supply (500W)
AMD XP 3000+
ASUS A7N8X-X
It could be a power supply problem. I had an Antec go bad recently,
and once the computer was running it was fine, but it didn't work
so well at startup. There were leaking capacitors inside the power
supply.
You can try verifying the main rail voltages, using a multimeter.
The 12V and 5V are available on a Molex hard drive connector. The
3.3V will be harder to get at (backside of the main power connector).
You might find that the 12V rail is outside the 5% allowed
variation. And that could account for some of the problems with
the hard drive.
Your UPS could beep on an overload. The ATX power supply has something
called "inrush", where the main capacitor inside the supply charges
quickly when you turn on the switch on the back. A device is included
inside the power supply, to temper the effect. The device when cold,
has a high resistance, and that reduces the magnitude of the current
rushing into the main capacitor. The temperature of the device rises
while the power supply is running, and the resistance of the device
drops (so there isn't as much power wasted). If you toggle the switch
on the back of the supply rapidly, that doesn't allow the device to
cool off, so at the instant the supply is switched on again, the
inrush would be larger. My UPS will beep, if I toggle the switch
on the supply rapidly, and that is not a good thing to do. When
the power supply is switched off, allow half a minute for the
thing to cool off, so the inrush won't be quite as big.
In this picture, NTCR1 on the upper left, limits the inrush.
http://www.pavouk.org/hw/en_atxps.html
*******
To give an example of a thing you can try, I cloned a drive the
other day using Linux. You want the output drive, to be the same
size or larger, than the input drive. You copy one drive to the other,
by booting a Linux LiveCD (Knoppix or Ubuntu), and then using a
command in a terminal window like this.
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hde
In my case, hda was on a motherboard ribbon cable, while hde happened
to be on a Promise Ultra133 TX2 PCI card connector. It took significantly
longer to copy than I expected (13MB/sec average), implying the Linux
OS didn't have DMA enabled somewhere. But in any case, the operation
copied all four partitions from one drive to the other, without having
any knowledge of what file systems were involved or anything. Such a
copy is sector by sector and sequential (less stress for the head assembly
on the hard drive), and copies the partition table and everything.
If the output drive (hde in the example), is smaller than the input
drive (hda), you might lose the last bits of the file system, which
potentially could be a bad thing. My drives happened to be exactly
the same size (same model).
If there were actual bad sectors on the source drive, I don't know what
would have happened. I scanned the drive for bad blocks, before doing
the copy, so I wasn't expecting to have a problem with it.
Paul
