Steve Erbach
erbachs at gmail.com
Tue Jan 24 12:52:55 CST 2006
Dear Group, I've dealt with a fair number of dying hard disks over the years, but this one behaves differently. It's a 20GB drive from a Gateway PC, vintage 2001 or so. It's loaded with Windows XP -- only 128 MB of RAM, though -- and it's pretty slow. But that isn't the problem. The problem comes when it starts. The POST will not appear on-screen and the system hangs. No drive activity. I plugged it into another system as a slave drive on an add-on IDE controller. When I turn on the system I get just so far in the Windows start up sequence and it hangs. When I disconnect the drive, everything's fine. I booted up the second system with my copy of Gibson's Spin Rite 6 and ran a level 4 routine on the drive. Apparently the drive is segmented into two pieces, one 20 GB, and the other maybe a few megabytes. The 20 GB drive sailed right through Spin Rite's tests, but when testing began on that second small partition, Spin Rite hung. The screens in Spin Rite still worked, I could flip back and forth between the different screens; but I could not Esc out and terminate. The Spin Rite menus would co-operate with my keystrokes, but cancelling the session simply had no effect. I could not terminate Spin Rite's tests in mid-stream. So, it looks like the second partition is hosed in some way and that affects the hardware's ability to boot the PC normally. Any of you have any ideas? I have not yet tried fdisk to erase that small partition. That's my next step. -- Regards, Steve Erbach Scientific Marketing Neenah, WI www.swerbach.com Security Page: www.swerbach.com/security