Today I became suspicious of Seagate products (part 1)
This is part of the hard disk recovery documentation.
Part 1.
Today I became suspicious of Seagate products (and my fortune in general)
Windows XP was running, and programs were being used. The disk was probably being accessed for memory cache. I noticed the drive making repetitive noises, spinning down and then spinning up, and the machine became unusable. I power-cycled the machine, and it was “NTOSKRNL.EXE is missing or corrupt.” Bad news.
To diagnose the problem, I booted the machine into “Dell diagnostic partition”, located at the front of the hard disk. This partition booted with no problem. Good? I used the “disk diagnostic” tool, which passed basic disk parameter checks (size of disk, for example), but upon reading the disk soon found read errors on some sectors. I started the same test at a later location to skip the damaged sectors, and passed a long error-free zone of the disk, but then encountered more erroneous sectors. After this, I tried the “disk confidence test” tool, which reads only small portions of the disk at a time, as a representative sampling of disk integrity. The test was proceding well, but I halted it for time reasons.
Next thing to do was to boot off the Windows XP CD, hoping to use its Recovery Console to see if the file system is still okay, and maybe try to fix the file system if the problem isn’t too serious. At this point however, my CD drive made a loud clicking noise, and I found the spindle plastic at the axis of the CD had come off the drive. Two malfunctions on the same day? Woe is me. What’s wrong with this picture — I don’t believe I killed any small animals today (or on any day really)!
So I pushed the spindle plastic back on, tried again. No luck. I conclude that the CD-ROM, my only other means of mass-input, is broken just when I need it quite much. In my last attempt to fix anything today, I tried white-out as glue on the plastic part. This worked. Unfortunately, the CD drive vibrates far more than before, due to its spindle being now slightly off-kilter. This isn’t going to last for very long…
So, in goes the XP CD and Recovery Console comes up, but the OS installation can’t even be found on the disk and there is no C: drive to inspect. Ouch. This is serious. One screw off and out pops the hard disk. Hoho! It’s a Seagate Momentus ST94811A, a so-called “reliable” drive. This machine is barely two years old! Woe be to Seagate which made the drive. Woe be to Seagate Momentus which is designed to run way too hot under the palm for a laptop hard disk anyway. That should have tipped me off. Hrmmmm.
Lessons today:
- When hard disk seems to churn more than usual paging (as in defragmentation-like churn), it may die soon.
- When your browser repeatedly crashes for no apparent reason after paging in from disk, yet your RAM is verifiably good, your disk may die soon.
- White-out is reasonably good plastic glue.
- Dell diagnostic partition takes up almost 50MB of disk space.
- Please choose a Seagate Momentus if you would like to burn your palm and lap.
- If there is some data you would rather not lose at this very moment, back up now.
On to Part 2.
