Hard drive seemed to have crashed badly, now it is working. Powerconnector?

[Gordon Holland]

Hi,

I bought a Maxtor 200gig drive on Wed.

Got it up partitioned/formatted and running. It was working fine at
first.
Yesterday I was transferring a fairly large file and it started clicking
rapidly, with no progress on the file transfer. it did this a few
times. I stopped it and powered down.

I couldn't get the drive to work after that. Sometimes it wasn't seen by
the bios. I tried to different 80 pin cables. I got it seen once or
twice by the bios.

On trying to initialise it would make some interesting and unpleasant
noises and a lot of rapid to-and fro clicking of the heads. Once I got
booted to windows with the drive being seen in the bios, but no drive
letters appeared.

I tried it on different branches of power connector off my splitter, but
all coming off the same central feed.

Then I put a 40 pin IDE cable on it for testing purposes, still no joy,
seen occasionally by the BIOS, usually hanging during bootup and then no
detect.

THEN I moved it onto a new power connector on a different feed, (the one
that supplies my optical drives), lo and behold it is recognised, seen
in windows, I can access my data (albeit slowly since it is on a 40 pin
cable ATM and running at ATA33 speed), and no clicking or strange
rattling noises.

So question is can a poor power feed cause the seeming symptoms of a
hard drive crash? it seems so. Or have I just lucked out for the time
being on getting it working? I.e can a drive seem to fail completely
more than once, with associated noises then have a stable uptime with no
apparent faults, with a coming crash?

I have a 400w psu, powering athlon 2.8XP, GF FX5200, X3 HDD'S, X3
Optical drives (on a promise controller) and 4 PCI cards.

TIA

 

[Dave C.]

Hi,

I bought a Maxtor 200gig drive on Wed.

Got it up partitioned/formatted and running. It was working fine at
first.
Yesterday I was transferring a fairly large file and it started clicking
rapidly, with no progress on the file transfer. it did this a few
times. I stopped it and powered down.

I couldn't get the drive to work after that. Sometimes it wasn't seen by
the bios. I tried to different 80 pin cables. I got it seen once or
twice by the bios.

On trying to initialise it would make some interesting and unpleasant
noises and a lot of rapid to-and fro clicking of the heads. Once I got
booted to windows with the drive being seen in the bios, but no drive
letters appeared.

I tried it on different branches of power connector off my splitter, but
all coming off the same central feed.

Then I put a 40 pin IDE cable on it for testing purposes, still no joy,
seen occasionally by the BIOS, usually hanging during bootup and then no
detect.

THEN I moved it onto a new power connector on a different feed, (the one
that supplies my optical drives), lo and behold it is recognised, seen
in windows, I can access my data (albeit slowly since it is on a 40 pin
cable ATM and running at ATA33 speed), and no clicking or strange
rattling noises.

So question is can a poor power feed cause the seeming symptoms of a
hard drive crash? it seems so. Or have I just lucked out for the time
being on getting it working? I.e can a drive seem to fail completely
more than once, with associated noises then have a stable uptime with no
apparent faults, with a coming crash?

I have a 400w psu, powering athlon 2.8XP, GF FX5200, X3 HDD'S, X3
Optical drives (on a promise controller) and 4 PCI cards.

TIA

Most likely it was just a loose power connection. But some power supplies
have separate circuits for various connectors. So it's possible your power
supply is going bad. More likely, you just fixed a loose connection by
plugging in a different power connector. -Dave

 

[DaveW]

Your power supply, probably a generic brand, is very underpowered for the
number of components and their power draw that you have. I would try
getting by with an Antec True Power 550 Watt PSU, if I were you.

 

[David Maynard]

Hi,

I bought a Maxtor 200gig drive on Wed.

Got it up partitioned/formatted and running. It was working fine at
first.
Yesterday I was transferring a fairly large file and it started clicking
rapidly, with no progress on the file transfer. it did this a few
times. I stopped it and powered down.

I couldn't get the drive to work after that. Sometimes it wasn't seen by
the bios. I tried to different 80 pin cables. I got it seen once or
twice by the bios.

On trying to initialise it would make some interesting and unpleasant
noises and a lot of rapid to-and fro clicking of the heads. Once I got
booted to windows with the drive being seen in the bios, but no drive
letters appeared.

I tried it on different branches of power connector off my splitter, but
all coming off the same central feed.

Then I put a 40 pin IDE cable on it for testing purposes, still no joy,
seen occasionally by the BIOS, usually hanging during bootup and then no
detect.

THEN I moved it onto a new power connector on a different feed, (the one
that supplies my optical drives), lo and behold it is recognised, seen
in windows, I can access my data (albeit slowly since it is on a 40 pin
cable ATM and running at ATA33 speed), and no clicking or strange
rattling noises.

So question is can a poor power feed cause the seeming symptoms of a
hard drive crash?

Certainly. Could be one of the female pins has spread a bit or a bad wire
crimp.

it seems so. Or have I just lucked out for the time
being on getting it working? I.e can a drive seem to fail completely
more than once, with associated noises then have a stable uptime with no
apparent faults, with a coming crash?

Possible, but less likely than the connector.

 

[JAD]

yes and please don't tell 'JK' he will be very unhappy...