Hard drive failures

[Guest]

Hello.

I sure hope somebody here can suggest something to the following problem
because it is starting to drive me insane.

I have a motherboard with 2 normal IDE connectors and 2 SCSI IDE connectors
via a Promise Ultra 100 onboard controller. I have 4 hard drives, all with a
single partition except for my system drive which is split into two primary
partitions.

In the last two days, I've had three of my drives experience sudden
problems. One lost it's MFT record effectively losing all the data on that
drive. Two others all of a sudden are continuously needing CHKDSK run on
them to get them to work. They keep having problems with the MFT as well,
specifically with the volume BITMAP record as well as indexing problems. At
the end of running CHKDSK on them it says that "The second NTFS boot sector
is unwriteable.". This showed up first on only one of the two drives, but a
few hours later it was on the other as well. Also, on one of them when I
try to do a surface check with the /R switch, it gets to 37% then stops.

Does anyone here know of possible reasons for this? I've checked for
viruses on both the filesystem and the MBR but they all come up clean. I'd
like to resolve this as soon as possible, and would appreciate ANY
suggestions.

Thanks a ton!

 

[Carey Frisch [MVP]]

Visit the support web site of the manufacturer of your
hard drive and search for a free drive fitness test program.

Example:

Program to help analyze, monitor, & restore the health of your drives
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm

--
Carey Frisch
Microsoft MVP
Windows XP - Shell/User
Microsoft Newsgroups

Get Windows XP Service Pack 2 with Advanced Security Technologies:
http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/protect/windowsxp/choose.mspx

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

:

| Hello.
|
| I sure hope somebody here can suggest something to the following problem
| because it is starting to drive me insane.
|
| I have a motherboard with 2 normal IDE connectors and 2 SCSI IDE connectors
| via a Promise Ultra 100 onboard controller. I have 4 hard drives, all with a
| single partition except for my system drive which is split into two primary
| partitions.
|
| In the last two days, I've had three of my drives experience sudden
| problems. One lost it's MFT record effectively losing all the data on that
| drive. Two others all of a sudden are continuously needing CHKDSK run on
| them to get them to work. They keep having problems with the MFT as well,
| specifically with the volume BITMAP record as well as indexing problems. At
| the end of running CHKDSK on them it says that "The second NTFS boot sector
| is unwriteable.". This showed up first on only one of the two drives, but a
| few hours later it was on the other as well. Also, on one of them when I
| try to do a surface check with the /R switch, it gets to 37% then stops.
|
| Does anyone here know of possible reasons for this? I've checked for
| viruses on both the filesystem and the MBR but they all come up clean. I'd
| like to resolve this as soon as possible, and would appreciate ANY
| suggestions.
|
| Thanks a ton!

 

[Mike Hall \(MS-MVP\)]

Nicholas

I would assume that the drives are mounted closely together.. I have no idea
what makes of drive you are using, but I will say some makes run very hot,
and when mounted in close proximity, can fail..

--
Mike Hall
MVP - Windows Shell/User

"If hard work were such a wonderful thing, surely the rich would have kept
it all to themselves." - Lane Kirkland

 

[Guest]

Thanks.

I've actually done this for my drives. The thing is that these problems are
happening to multiple drives withing a very short time span. I guess I was
wondering if anyone might know the cause behind it.

Thanks though.

 

[Mike Painter]

Hello.

I sure hope somebody here can suggest something to the following
problem because it is starting to drive me insane.

I have a motherboard with 2 normal IDE connectors and 2 SCSI IDE
connectors via a Promise Ultra 100 onboard controller. I have 4 hard
drives, all with a single partition except for my system drive which
is split into two primary partitions.

In the last two days, I've had three of my drives experience sudden
problems. One lost it's MFT record effectively losing all the data
on that drive. Two others all of a sudden are continuously needing
CHKDSK run on them to get them to work. They keep having problems
with the MFT as well, specifically with the volume BITMAP record as
well as indexing problems. At the end of running CHKDSK on them it
says that "The second NTFS boot sector is unwriteable.". This showed
up first on only one of the two drives, but a few hours later it was
on the other as well. Also, on one of them when I try to do a
surface check with the /R switch, it gets to 37% then stops.

Does anyone here know of possible reasons for this? I've checked for
viruses on both the filesystem and the MBR but they all come up
clean. I'd like to resolve this as soon as possible, and would
appreciate ANY suggestions.

I'd start by looking at the power supply.

 

[Guest]

I think I may have figured it out.

It appears that the problem may have been the onboard Promise controller. I
unplugged everything from it and using only the onboard IDE ran CHKDSK on all
my drives. It found tons of errors with the MFT records on them, but after a
few additional runs they were all fixed. A scan with /X /V /R now shows all
is well.

I suppose I'll try contacting Promise to see if they have any ideas about
how to confirm this, but I doubt they'll be of much help.

Thanks for all your suggestions. If the problems resurface I suppose I'll be
back.

Nick

 

[Leythos]

Hello.

I sure hope somebody here can suggest something to the following problem
because it is starting to drive me insane.

I have a motherboard with 2 normal IDE connectors and 2 SCSI IDE connectors
via a Promise Ultra 100 onboard controller. I have 4 hard drives, all with a
single partition except for my system drive which is split into two primary
partitions.

You mean SATA not SCSI would be my guess as Promise doesn't have a SCSI
IDE setup, only IDE or SCSI or SATA.

We use the Promise SX6000, TX2, and the onboard Promise RAID controller
on ASUS PC-DL motherboards.

In the last two days, I've had three of my drives experience sudden
problems. One lost it's MFT record effectively losing all the data on that
drive. Two others all of a sudden are continuously needing CHKDSK run on
them to get them to work. They keep having problems with the MFT as well,
specifically with the volume BITMAP record as well as indexing problems. At
the end of running CHKDSK on them it says that "The second NTFS boot sector
is unwriteable.". This showed up first on only one of the two drives, but a
few hours later it was on the other as well. Also, on one of them when I
try to do a surface check with the /R switch, it gets to 37% then stops.

Does anyone here know of possible reasons for this? I've checked for
viruses on both the filesystem and the MBR but they all come up clean. I'd
like to resolve this as soon as possible, and would appreciate ANY
suggestions.

Sure, two things are very likely - Heat and/or Power.

If you have 4 hard drives you need a quality 450W or larger Power
supply. You also need to have a Fan in the Power Supply, one for the
CPU, one for the front of the case blowing across the drives, and one at
the back of the case drawing air out of the case. Drives cause a lot of
heat and that's the quickest way to kill them.

We have a couple SX6000 RAID arrays with 6x250GB Maxtor drives, gives
about 1.3TB of space, but we have redundant 600W+ power supply units in
those machines.