Peculiar hard drive failure - can anyone advise me?

[fendel]

Here's a weird one. Maybe someone can help me puzzle this out.

I added a new 120GB Maxtor drive about ten days ago, using the MaxBlast software to clone my old C: partition over to it. Took out the previous boot drive, set up the new one as the boot drive (put it as master on the primary IDE channel). Booted up, things seemed normal. Over the next few days, however, I started noticing strange behavior:
* One of my drives was making clicking sounds periodically.
* Occasionally the machine simply froze up.
* Several times, when I tried to (re)start, it didn't recognize the boot drive.

I suspected the new drive was defective. A couple times, I was downloading something to one of my old drives--for clarity let's call it O:\MUSIC--and the machine hung. Figured it had something to do with the new drive. (For what it's worth, my swapfile is on a third drive; only my system files and applications are on C:\.) Didn't get around to taking the new drive out, though...

A few days ago the O:\ drive "disappeared" in Windows Explorer. When I rebooted, it was there again. Odd.

Then the other day, I got an unusual error when writing to the O:\ drive. When I checked in Explorer, the drive label was gone and the drive appeared to be unformatted. Checked the jumper settings, tried a different cable and attached it to my add-in IDE controller card instead of the motherboard IDE channels; nada. Finally I ran data-recovery software, which is currently chugging away retrieving my files from the drive.

I have two scenarios I'm considering:
(1) The problems, including boot failures, were caused by my failing O:\ drive, which was the slave on the primary channel.
(2) There is still a problem lurking with my C:\ drive (the new one) and somehow it screwed up the O:\ drive.

Are these plausible? What seems more likely?

FWIW, system is as follows -
Athlon XP 2000+
512MB PC2100 DDR RAM
ECS K7S6A
Four Maxtor drives (120, 120, 80, 80GB), one of which is on an old Promise 66 card
CDRW
400W Antec PS

Appreciate any light you guys can shed on this...

Also: is it safe to reformat and reuse the O:\ drive?

thanks,
fendel

Edit: Diagnostic test reveals 3 unreadable sectors on the O:\ drive, otherwise looks OK.

 

[InlineFive]

Try taking out the clicking drive and see if that fixes the problems. When a hard drives starts clicking that's never a good thing. And since you said it also has bad sectors I think you should probably RMA that drive before it's too late to do so.

-Por

 

[CraigRT]

heh, I hate Maxtor.. that sounds so familiar. it seems like their working rate is lower than their failure rate in my experiences... bleh

 

[fendel]

Actually, it's the old drive that has bad sectors (bought it a few years ago). I guess I should run the diagnostic on the new drive too while I'm at it...

Unfortunately I'm not certain which drive was clicking. I'm guessing it was the old (O:\) drive, since that's the one that failed. The clicking has stopped now.

As for Maxtor quality, I've had 7 or 8 of their drives (2 now in my significant other's machine, 4 in my current machine, 1 or 2 smaller drives "retired" in the closet) and never had a problem before. Dunno.

In general, is it safe to reformat and reuse a hard drive that failed? (I did reformat and copied some disposable stuff over to it; so far no problems. Not sure I can trust it with anything important tho. New drive label is CRASH...)