Need help with HDD problem

[ripthesystem]

Well about 4 months ago I got this WD2500JD SATA drive to act as a storage drive for my system. Bought the drive (non-retail) from NewEgg and it didn't come with a cable so I had to buy a cable from them too.

Hooked it up, formatted, started using it.. no problems.

So about a month ago or so my PC started locking up from time to time. Seemed completely random and not dependent on what I was doing. At first I thought it was a memory problem but memtest86 came up clean and shiny. When the PC would lock up it would take a hard reboot to get it to come back but then it would work fine. Sometimes for a minute, sometimes for days at a time.

One time after a lockup/reboot I noticed that this drive wasn't showing up under My Computer. I thought that was quite odd. I rebooted and it was back. This happened a few other times until once last week.

Last week I got a lockup and on reboot Windows XP comes up with a disk check and says this drive has inconsistancies and needs to be checked. I let it check the drive, it scans it for maybe 2-3 seconds and gives no messages but then in XP-- it shows the drive under My Computer but it won't let me access it.

If I try to access it via XP it says

G:\ is not accessible.
The disk structure is corrupted and unreadable

Great! So I use a program called GetDataBack for NTFS and through lots of days and time I've managed to back up my data!! YEAH!

But what's the problem?

I download Western Digital Data LifeGuard Diagnostics (DLGDIAG for Windows) and run both a Quick and Extensive Test on the HDD and it comes up perfectly fine with no errors.

Any ideas what the problem is? Or where to start? I really don't want to go through all this again. On the same note, since that drive 'died' in XP my computer hasn't locked up at all.

HELP!
Thx in advance!

 

[stevty2889]

I would try TestDisk. I have used it to repair and recover partitions several times, even if the drive was repartitioned and written over, it was still able to find and restore the old partitions. It's also free, probably a little trickier than some other programs, but worked well for me.

 

[ripthesystem]

I tried TestDisk and it finds the drive and analyzes it and even finds the NTFS partition. I haven't tried a recovery with the tool yet.. My main concern is WHY this was happening as I would like to prevent it from happening again. Ideas?

 

[birdpup]

Heat - Try rigging a fan behind the drive to cool it off.
Power Supply - hard drives are extremely vulnerable to power variations. I would also recommend a UPS battery backup with undervoltage protection to locally regulate power supplied to your system.

Vibration, bumping, moving the case while the drive is spinning.

Some people claim that desktop hard drives (non-SCSI) are not intended to be run 24 hours a day for weeks or months on end.

Why is it that when I click on your link to "Cool People from Akron", the title in the title bar changes to "You Suck at the Internet"?

 

[ripthesystem]

Thanks for the suggestions birdpup.
As far as heat goes.. it's only a backup drive so it's not accessed all the time and the case is cool cool cool.

The PSU is a 475 Enermax Noisetaker, and it's currently running the drive w/o probs even when XP won't allow me direct access.

I thought about the bumping around bit, but realisitically, this case doesn't move.
Perhaps a short in the SATA cable?

I don't know.. I'm kinda lost here and I really don't want to go thru this again. I guess I will just try to write Zero's to the drive, reinstall the data and see how it goes over time. Not my preferred method but nothing else seems to be presenting itself.





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As for the CPFA question.. The site is running SnakeSEO for Postnuke. One of the things that happens a lot on that site is that that title gets changed frequently. So, since SnakeSEO is implemented, those files should be updated manually everytime the title is changed. Since we're essentially too lazy for something so trivial.. you get 1 title when Snake is hit and another for the site.

I could go into more detail but it's fairly boring minutae

 

[birdpup]

On second thought. I would bet that since that drive has failed, it will fail again withina relatively short time such as 6-14 months. Something caused it to fail that first time, like maybe heat, and this may continue. I recommend testing this drive often, possible once a month now on.

I have found that failure events are warning signs of impending total failure, even when the drive passes its diagnostic tests. If the drive is still within its warranty, use it as a backup drive or use it heavily in some manner, test if often, and definitely test it before the warranty expires. If you obtain a failure notice on any test, RMA it back to WD.

 

[ripthesystem]

Will do. Thank you very much!