Bad sectors

irishguy

is it possible to recover data off a hardrive that has multiple bad sectors we are talking 7000 + the drive (IBM 41gig 60gxp) was working fine then the other day i tryed to boot and i heard a straching noise louder than usual the comp booted but crashed i restarted and ran scan disk i got somethiing like 7000+ bad sectors i could be bothered letting it finish so i stoped it and used another drive. the drive was only manfactured in oct 2001 or would you recomend i just return it to IBM?

Spoonman

I had similar trouble with a september '01 IBM 41gb gxp60 HD, currently its got to RMA. Failure rate of this drive is about the same as the gxp75, lot of ppl giving out about them atm. Wish I knew more about them before I bought one, now I'm suck with it.

Before it gave up completely I was able to copy some folders from the hd onto another HD but the folders that had bad sectors I had to forget about it. Soon after the bios stopped detecting the HD at all.

I read a few articles about it afterwards, one of them recommends keeping active cooling on the harddrive and it should be ok. apparently the controler chips on them overheat easily. So if anyone has one atm without active cooling, be warned its a timebomb wating to happen!

Gerry

My 75gxp is still working perfectly, I had some bad sectors a while back, but it did coincide with a power surge, and I haven't had any problems since. I do have cooling on the drive. Judging by the reviews of the new 120gxp drive, my next drive will be IBM also.

irishguy

will IBM replace my drive ?? its only about 6months old

Inspector Gadget

this might prove interesting to those suffering from dodgy IBM 60 and 75 GXPs...

I haven't read it, but I found it in a forum on overclockers.co.uk that also contains the following (and I quote )

How To Fix Your Broken IBM HDD
Received the following information from Andrew Cichocki by email, I've not tried this yet but it may be of some use to you all so I thought I' post it.

...Edited headers and stuff.....

I have found a way of recovering a faulty IBM hardrive.
Scenario:-
The hard drive goes belly up, the dreaded clicking sound and no amount of scandisks or formating will recover it.
Sound familiar ?
Well get yourself to the IBM site and download the drive fitness test http://service.boulder.ibm.com/storage/hddtech/dft32-v230.exe (Windows flavour)
and the IBM feature tool
http://service.boulder.ibm.com/storage/hddtech/ibmftool-install.exe (Windows flavour)
Other OS's catered for on the IBM Drive site.
These should each create a bootable floppy.

Run the drive fitness test.
My HD made the most horrible squealing noises at this point, came back with sector errors, interface errors and unknown errors !?????
I tried to wipe it with the zero all sectors option, with no sucess. Note: this is also useful if you have an NTFS partition and you want to get rid of it !.

This should tell you if your drive is indeed duff, normaly, it would be time to relegate it to the trash bin.
Not necessarily so.

Now boot up off the other disk (IBM feature tool).
In the options, switch both read and write ahead caching off, set the acoustic level down to minimum, this I believe slows the head seek movement down and I also had the power saving set to HD slow down rpm in power saving mode.

Now Boot off the Drive fitness disk again and zero all the sectors, with luck, it will now work.
Why? I can only assume that the drive loses track of where it is on the platter due to a dropout of formatting information on the disk, and with the high speed of the head positioning arm, it misses the track.
Slowing everything down gives it a chance to find the correct track sector etc.

You may be wondering why I suspect this is the problem?
I had a complete system failure using this HD some time ago, luckily I managed to track down the faulty file and replace it. Upon closer examination of the file, I found that a track worths of zeros had mysteriously appeared in the middle of it. It would indicate, that whilst writing the data to the HD, it skipped a track, but upon reading at bootup, it read it alright.
Also the squealing noise is the head positioning system desperately trying to move the heads to the next track, which the HD knows exist, but does not know that the head mechanism has already got to the physical end of it's travel, since it has skipped tracks.

If it zero's OK, do an advanced test just for good measure.
Boot up off the IBM feature tool disk, set all the caches back on and the speeds up to full, acoustic levels to loudest (max performance).
Once done, you should have a fully working IBM Hard disk again!.

I have ran test after test on mine and am using it again without a single glitch !.

At the moment, I don't know if this is a temperature related fault so I have fitted mine into cooldrive 2 cases just in case, it may be worth testing a drive with the temperature monitor utility on one of the bootable floppies to see what sort of uncooled temperature these drives can get too, then artifically heating the drive to the same temp, NO NAKED FLAMES !, then run Scandisk or some other utility to carry out a surface test on the Drive.
It may be worth leaving the acoustic level down a notch or two if the HD plays up again, this will of course slow the seek times down a little, but I hardly think you would notice it.

Hope you have some success.
Andrew Cichocki.

__________________
James Dagger,

Overclockers UK - Technical Manager

...according to the rest of the thread, it's not foolproof or anything, but it might work, at least for a while...

Gadget

Gerry

eh thats ****ing sweet.

JustHalf

At least you know what to do to quiet down that drive of yours.

I wonder if Quantum (Maxtor) do something similar for their Fireball AS's. They're supposed to have some sort of quieting function, but I can't remember if that was a special version of the drive or not. Argh, checking now.

Edit: Darn, it's an "option" on the drive.

irishguy

k ill try that hope it works i had about 30gigs on that drive.But do you think IBM will replace it??? they should do its not realy old

Spoonman

What kindof cooling have you on it Gerry, got a picture or a link to the type of fans needed. I was thinking myself of putting it between a 92mm and 80mm fan (if I get it back from RMA), perhaps that would be overkill but better safe than sorry!

Irishguy its difficult to say, RMA varies between manufacturer. If you've no other option with it then send it on to RMA well packed, check their site for guidelines.

Gerry

Its in an "ultimate hardrive cooler" basically a huge blue heatsink which goes on top of the drive, attached to 2 mounting rails so you can put the lot in a 5.25 drive bay. Theres reviews of it around on the net. Theres 2 40mm fans on the front of it, blowing cool air in from a vented 5.25 panel through the heatsink. However the fans are far too loud, and since theres plenty of room above and below the drive (full tower case), the heatsink just gets warm to the touch without having the fans on. I plan on putting some sound deadening material around the drive to reduce noise, this would have the effect of reducing airflow, so I will wire the fans to run on 5 volts. Also I think I will put a heatsink on the main controller chip on the underside of the drive, since it is supposed to be one of the main causes of failures.