In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage
(E-Mail Removed) wrote:
> I have a friend with a 250GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 SATA (in a Win
> XP Pro machine) that's throwing weird partition issues at the drop of
> a hat.
> Last week, after the PC crashed in a game, the entire drive (3 primary
> NTFS partitions) became inaccessible. Partition Magic 8 showed it as
> one errored partition. I could get data off any of the three
> partitions with a partition recovery program, but not actually restore
> the partitions themselves. I finally had to 0-out the drive and re-
> partition.
> Now, yesterday, a power surge during a rain storm (he really does know
> better than that) it powered down, and when it came back, the first
> (active) partition (this time FAT32) was showing as unformatted! (At
> least the other 2 partitions are still there and Partition magic can
> "see" them.)
> All CHKDSK tests, Partition Magic tests, other drive checking programs
> all discover no errors with the drive. (Well, once it's partitioned
> and formatted).
> Any ideas?
> Thanks,
> Liam
Potential reasons:
Driver or hardware issues that cause transient problems and
prevent timely write-back of information (unlikely) or cause
writes to the wring areas. It may be faulty RAM. It may be
a faultu cache entry or the like.
What would be interesting is whether there is any other
data corruption and what its exact form is (e.g.
is there an all-zero sector or is some other data in it).
Have you looked at the SMART attributes (any other test is
really quite meaningless today) and tun a long SMART selftest?
Arno