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I think I'm going to get sick
I bought a 60GB IBM Deskstar hard drive less than 2 months ago. Last night the thing started making a "clink-ding" noise every few seconds. At first that seemed normal as I've had this sort of thing happen before and nothing came of it and it went away. However, it continued to do it for 15 minutes so I shut down the computer. Upon rebooting it this morning the drive was no longer detected. Sometimes that happens, and a reboot fixes the problem.

Not this time. So I take it off and install it on this computer and the bios finds it just fine. But, when booting into XP, chkdsk starts running and starts reporting bad segments left and right. I let it go for 10 minutes and it was still scanning the disk and reporting bad segments so I rebooted and skipped the test. the pc then was extremely slow in loading into XP (ie... 5 minutes). Device manager reports nothing wrong with the drive, except that it needs to be formatted. UGH!

so I went to recovery mode from my cd and tried rewrting the partition tables and boot records since that had worked in the past. nope. so then I went to IBM's website and downloaded some diagnostics program. Well, what do you know... the drive failed all tests.

ugh... that'll teach me to use a single hard drive for backups. This drive had all my files from previous hard drives (3 of them). Something like $3k or so worth of 6 years of work and installed programs. So... all of my k's of emails, Perl programs I wrote (sorry Links 2.0 folks...), and what not. [the drive was used as the primary master on my secondary machine; I used file sharing over my LAN connection to serve as a backup system... I never copied anything from that drive over to my primay computer in order to conserve disk space]

Guess I'll be getting a couple non-IBM hard drives and syncing them every couple of days. I'm not into fooling around making backups through CDs. who has time to sift though GB's of data to backup important stuff, much less burn dozens of CD's?

Any suggestions and QUALITY hard drives?

--Philip
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Re: [sponge] I think I'm going to get sick In reply to
Ouch, sorry to hear that.
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Re: [sponge] I think I'm going to get sick In reply to
I've never had any issues with the IBM drives.... I love them.
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Re: [sponge] I think I'm going to get sick In reply to
I've also had good luck with IBM drives, desktop and laptop. But thats not to say you can't be the unluck odd person who got a dud.


http://www.iuni.com/...tware/web/index.html
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Re: [Ian] I think I'm going to get sick In reply to
It boggles my mind how it just up and crapped out suddenly without warning. The IBM diagnostics program reported the drives "SMART" status as "good", despite the drive failing ALL other tests. I had a 8.5GB Wesdtern Digital from a system I bought 6 years ago fail on me 3 months ago, but at least had an error during POST warning me to backup my files.

I'll be going to the shop today for a replacement. Hm.. can I trust them to not try to fix the drive after I exchange it? There are confidential files on it... and there is no way for me to know that it's all really lost. [if I knew it was repairable, then I'd just buy a new one and keep the old in storage and not fix it, rather than authorizing someone access to the recoverable files]

--Philip
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Re: [sponge] I think I'm going to get sick In reply to
I know what you mean about confidential files. As you mentioned, if you had all of the valueable material on it, I would consider haning onto the drive for now. Maybe you could get the information off of it, once you get your new drive going, who knows - then take it back if you still have time!


http://www.iuni.com/...tware/web/index.html
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Re: [sponge] I think I'm going to get sick In reply to
I guess you haven't heard about the whole reliability issue with IBM drives lately? Unsure Couldn't find any good articles about it, so this will have to do: http://www.pcworld.com/...,tk,dn082901X,00.asp

Reliable hard drives? I'd say that most of the few main manufacturers are fine; I have no clue what happened with IBM, but they screwed up real bad somewhere. We're currently using Maxtor hard drives in our servers. Western Digital and Seagate are good too.

Every company has their bad period I guess. Maxtors and Western Digital's weren't that great at one time or another. If your data's that important to you, I'd get a good tape backup and do rotated backups (store a copy in a safe place). If it's not a huge amount of data, even just burning it onto CD's is a good alternative.

Also remember you CAN recover your data with the help of a professional. I'm not sure how much it'd cost, but if your data means a lot to you, you should check it out.

Adrian
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Re: [sponge] I think I'm going to get sick In reply to
Maxtors are the way to go definitily. Western Digital aren't as good as what they used to be. I use Maxtors in all our desktop and production servers at the moment, and I'm more than happy with them.

In fact, if I remember correctly, 60gig Maxtor drives are what used by Google.

- wil
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Re: [brewt] I think I'm going to get sick In reply to
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I guess you haven't heard about the whole reliability issue with IBM drives lately?

I've heard complaints about bad IBM drives but far less than the number of good reports I read. I have the 60GXP (or was it the 60GB 120GXP??).

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If your data's that important to you, I'd get a good tape backup and do rotated backups

hehe... tapes are ghetto. Tongue Reminds me of my dad's C-64, and this little accessory thing you attached on a regular tape recorder to make it work as a tape drive. I'm sure things are different now. I may go for setting up a hotswapping system with a couple of cheap 20GB drives.

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Also remember you CAN recover your data with the help of a professional. I'm not sure how much it'd cost,

I may look into seeing if there's something I can do on my own after some reading. I don't have money for professional service at this point.

--Philip
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Re: [sponge] I think I'm going to get sick In reply to
After the shock of losing a month of work, I've started to get into the habit of backing up my work on at least two other systems that are in physically different locations. Might be worth looking at those online file store areas, they'll probably even make backups of your backups Smile (another good thing about this is that if you box gets stolen or your place gets taken over by angry chipmunks you still have two fallbacks from which to restore your data)

That might be one of the cheapest ways for future reference.

Maybe Norton Diskdoctor may be of help. Aside from that, a those professionals I hear are pretty good. They've got specialized equipment to retreive even deleted files. I hear in the security industry, they used to (may still do) take HDs with classified information to the grind wheel since the data's magnetic footprint eventually goes so far into the platter. (rm -rf / just wipes away the top layer)
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Re: [Aki] I think I'm going to get sick In reply to
ughhhh, I've had a western digital die a while back, a Seagate along time ago.

IBM drives are bit noiser than Seagate I noticed ... could be models or what not though too.

ugh, I just bought a big 120 gig IBM drive too IC35L120AVVA07-0 .... ugh

openoffice + gimp + sketch ... Smile
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Re: [sponge] I think I'm going to get sick In reply to
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hehe... tapes are ghetto. Tongue Reminds me of my dad's C-64, and this little accessory thing you attached on a regular tape recorder to make it work as a tape drive. I'm sure things are different now. I may go for setting up a hotswapping system with a couple of cheap 20GB drives.

Tape drives are very mainstream in corporate networks. I work for a multi-billion dollar corporation that implements DLTs and SDLTs with every server. They recently (about a year ago) implemented huge tape silos with robotic arms (the arm is about 7 feet tall). On the ends of the robotic arms are cameras so you can see the action inside the silo. The arms move so fast, it looks like the v-hold is messed up on the monitors. Anyway, I acquired an older Compaq DLT 15/30 that was being retired and I currently use it at home. It works great and is very fast for backing up my data. You might search for "DLT" on Ebay and see what's out there. They are SCSI, so you will need a good SCSI controller...


Here's the drive I own:



I have around a dozen tapes, and I just rotate them daily...

Sean

Last edited by:

SeanP: Aug 21, 2002, 8:26 AM
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Re: [SeanP] I think I'm going to get sick In reply to
Sean

What software do you use for backup? I'm evaluating networked backup software for a Windows based network at the moment, and would welcome any suggestions.

- wil
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Re: [Wil] I think I'm going to get sick In reply to
At work we use Veritas BackupExec... At home, just Windows Backup...

http://www.veritas.com

Sean

Last edited by:

SeanP: Aug 21, 2002, 8:28 AM
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Re: [SeanP] I think I'm going to get sick In reply to
Veritas is decent...but Seagate's products are much better, IMO.
========================================
Buh Bye!

Cheers,
Me
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Re: [Stealth] I think I'm going to get sick In reply to
I just bought a 60GB Seagate Barracuda ATA IV for my replacement. Any thoughts on this particular drive?

--Philip
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Re: [Wil] I think I'm going to get sick In reply to
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In fact, if I remember correctly, 60gig Maxtor drives are what used by Google.

Google use 80 gig drives, two per server with one controller per drive. Some machines have 4 controllers, 4 drives and 2 cpu's
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Re: [sponge] I think I'm going to get sick In reply to
Philip,

Hmm...not familar with that particular model, but I can tell you this much...at work, we are trying to re-build this one computer to be another dev server, which we figured out that the particular motherboard will not allow WinNT or Win2K to be installed. Anyway, we decided to re-build it as another workstation, and we have tried two other hard drives, including a Maxtor and an old IBM, neither of them will work, giving us "partition table" errors.

But we slapped a 60G Seagate, an older drive, and boom, we were able to re-build the box with no problems...

Not to say that this is the best example of Seagate products, but I've always been impressed with their hardware and software, particularly their software.
========================================
Buh Bye!

Cheers,
Me
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Re: [Stealth] I think I'm going to get sick In reply to
Agreed, Seagate has come a long way since 87'

I found the drives that I had were very quite and dependable.

openoffice + gimp + sketch ... Smile
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Re: [QooQ] I think I'm going to get sick In reply to
For the time being I've slapped the drive onto my main pc, and will be moving the smaller drive to my other. To help with organization as well as making backups, I've created 3 partitions.

Partition 1 is 20GB and is where the OS and installed programs live. Partition 2 is 30GB and is for all my files. I'll be doing bi-weekly searches on my files partition for changes and writing them to a cdrw with packet writing software. The remaining 7GB are for network shares (install programs and shortcuts to shared programs/files on 2nd partition) and miscellaneous temporary files. These will for the most part not be backed up since they'll generally be replaceable via the Internet.

I don't think that simply imaging a whole WinXP installation will work since the activation is tied in part to the disks' serial number and what not. I've already had to call MS to reactivate my copy once.

--Philip
Links 2.0 moderator
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Re: [PerlPod] I think I'm going to get sick In reply to
Paul

Yes, you're right. That's the correct quote from the earlier article linked to by Alex.

- wil
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Re: [sponge] I think I'm going to get sick In reply to
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don't think that simply imaging a whole WinXP installation will work since the activation is tied in part to the disks' serial number and what not. I've already had to call MS to reactivate my copy once.

You had to call MS to reactivate? I don't have XP so I'm not familiar with how the new copy protection scheme works. A simple cd key doesn't work anymore?
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Re: [Aki] I think I'm going to get sick In reply to
You get a CD key, but after X number of changes to your hardware, winXP's checksum comparison deviates too much that it thinks you copied the installation to another computer. Also after X number of installations, you much call MS and explain why you installed it so many times, and they'll give this long-ass verification number as a new key. it's a pain in the butt and a waste of MS's time and money. I don't think they'll keep the activation scheme running for more than a few years.

I don't think the Corporate edition requires activation.

--Philip
Links 2.0 moderator
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Re: [sponge] I think I'm going to get sick In reply to
Windows XP professional requires activation, if that's what you mean.

- wil
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Re: [Wil] I think I'm going to get sick In reply to
It may not be the same thing, but I think if your company gets the MSDN subscription to the product-line, you don't have to worry about cd keys for any installation. Those subscriptions are frightfully expensive though.
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