Sysdll Posted December 29, 2007 Share Posted December 29, 2007 (edited) Repeated power outages can cause all kinds of errors. Power outages and spikes can also damage ram and bad ram will cause scandisk to report errors where there are none. Also when troubleshooting older computers (or any electronic equipment) it’s always a good idea to take it apart, clean it, and put it back together. Edited December 29, 2007 by Sysdll Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fredledingue Posted December 29, 2007 Author Share Posted December 29, 2007 Thanks for your comments! And happy new year! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
erpdude8 Posted January 2, 2008 Share Posted January 2, 2008 Run Scandisk with the Thorough option in Win9x, or run Scandisk in DOS with the /surface option to check the hard drive for physical damage (aka. bad sectors). A LOT of bad sectors on the hard disk mean that the drive is about to be headed towards the afterlife and will need to be replaced.If you live in an area where repeated power spikes occur I suggest you buy a UPS (uninterrupted power supply) unit. UPS units can supply power to your computer even in a black out, brown out or other power problems and prevent damage to your computer and other electrical appliances.Happy New Year 2008 to everyone! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
puntoMX Posted January 2, 2008 Share Posted January 2, 2008 What does it tell, Doctor? My first impression is a dying motor and/or head-mechanism, or at least not powerful enough.I would leave the drive as it is and use only your new 250GB, its way faster any way and I’m sure you won’t miss your 40GB. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RainyShadow Posted January 3, 2008 Share Posted January 3, 2008 SMART values are not too bad, but it seems to be disabled so these numbers might not be actual.I'd suggest you get a copy of MHDD and use it to further diagnose the drive.When you start the program and select the proper drive, first type "smart on" to enable SMART, then "smart aas" to enable attribute autosave. Then press F4 and perform a full scan with remmaping disabled . After it ends take a note of the bad sectors number (if any). If there are not much of these you could just scan again with remapping enabled, this will replace the bad sectors with spare sectors. If you do this, scan again to make sure that there are no more remaining bad sectors.If there are a lot bad sectors ( more than 30-50) it's better to not remap them because you may run out of spare sectors and need them later. Better check for grouped bad sectors and repartition the drive leaving the bad areas between the partitions. You can later remap only single sectors left within partitions by performing a write operation on them (SMART remaps sectors only during writes).You could also switch the DMA mode to UDMA/33 and see if that helps. Type "config" in MHDD and if there is a setting for the DMA mode change it. You have to power-cycle the drive for this to take effect. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
puntoMX Posted January 3, 2008 Share Posted January 3, 2008 RainyShadow,Thank you for the 2 links to the tools, very useful . Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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