hard drive randomly and frequently losing partition information

[gerryf]

OK, this is an odd one.

My nephew's computer has mysteriously deformatted" itself three times in the
past month. He will be using it without problem, then shutdown for the night
and the next day he turns the machine on to a hard drive with nothing on it.

I'm not there so I don't know what might be preceding this, though mostly
his habits are playing games and editing his myspace page

He swears he is shutting down properly (start > turn off machine)

The previous two times, I loaded the drive in a second machine to take a
look and in both cases there was no partition present--various software
tools did reveal one oddity (well, in addition to the missing
partition)...the last time this happened (I didn't check the first time),
the program testdisk believed that it found a Novell Netware Partition. It
was not able to restore it, but that was clearly strange.

After each episode, I simply reinstalled his OS for him and all worked well
for about two weeks. He uses his machine heavily, spending hours a day on
it.

The pc is a fairly non-descript with a Foxconn 6150BK8MC-KRSH based on the
nvidia 6150 chipset. We are not using the integrated video. It is not
overclocked. All BIOS and drivers are uptodate. The OS is Windows XP sp2
with all updates.

The hard drive is a SAMSUNG SpinPoint T Series HD501LJ 500GB 7200 RPM SATA
3.0Gb/s

It is connected to the motherboards integrated nvidia sataII controller
operating in non-raid mode

About the only thing interesting about the motherboard is it includes TPM,
though that is disabled.

I did not change out the drive last time, as it tested fine with the Samsung
hd501lj utility--I did not do a low-level format...perhaps I will this time.
Just wanted to run this by some other folks and see if it rang a bell

 

[Jerry]

You could also try Spinrite - get it at www.grc.com

 

[Pat Glenn]

I had a similar problem once. I was trying to set up a friends computer. The
process involved installing drivers and re-booting several times Sometimes
when I 'd re-boot everything would be fine, but other times the HD would be
blank and I'd have to start all over again. It drove me 'up the wall' for 3
hours.

Turned out to be a flakey hard drive. It was a brand new computer, so in
this instance, the drive was replaced under warranty.

 

[gerryf]

I also suspect the drive is just flakey--it is just annoying as it worked
for an entire month before exhibiting this behavior.

I am going to swap it out and mount it as a secondary drive in another
machine and torture the heck out of it with about 100 backups and see what
happens.

 

[Miles Li [MSFT]]

Dear Customer,

Thanks for posting here.

For the unexpected hard drive partition missing, there are two suggestions
for this issue:

1. Some viruses may crack the MBR(Master Boot Record) that will make the
partitions invisible. Please make sure that the system is virus-free and
gets the latest updates.

2. Have a full test of the hard drive. A hardware error will make the disk
instable (like missing partitions). There should be a brand specific test
tool available from the manufacturer. Try to diagnose the state of the
drive and make sure it is normal.

Hutil (The Drive Diagnostic Utility) for Samsung
http://www.samsung.com/global/business/hdd/support/utilities/Support_HUTIL.h
tml

Hope this helps.


Miles Li
Microsoft Online Partner Support

 

[gerryf]

Thank you Miles,

as noted in my original post, I actually DID test it with Hutil (I gave the
zip name in the original post--it all tested positive.

I still think it is a wonky drive though....placed a different drive in and
am waiting to see what happens.

In the meantime, I have mounted the drive as secondary and am watching it
to see what happens (running nightly backups of unimportant data)