marc@rna.UUCP (Marc Johnson) (11/30/88)
Okay, now I'm really annoyed (and mystified).
I have a Panasonic 286 machine ("Business Partner"), and about 10 months
ago I started having read/write problems in certain areas (high clusters)
of my Priam 24.5 MByte hard disk. The disk had been running without problems
for 2 years. After trying reformatting twice, and running both MACE and
Norton Disk Tests repeatedly, I decided that there must be a surface defect
in the upper regions of the disk (i.e., high cluster numbers). One odd thing
was that the errors did not show up when I did the disk tests immediately
after a reformat, only after data was actually on the disk.
The symptom is that the machine tries to read the disk, the disk kind of
buzzes, then there's a wait (about 30 seconds?) during which things are quiet,
and an error condition is returned. During the wait time, the disk access
light is NOT illuminated, although it is lit for the initial access.
Since the errors seemed confined to these high clusters, I re-partitioned the
disk to 21 Mbytes, effectively excluding the problem area. The disk has
run without problems since then.
Now, I just replaced the Priam with a Seagate ST-4096 80-MByte drive. After
some painful initialization, partitioning and formatting (Panasonic BIOS has
a bug that affects setting up multiple partitions over 32 MBytes), I got the
thing to work just fine. The C: partition is 32 Mbytes, and that's all I'm
using right now (D: is 48 MBytes). After restoring my Fastback'ed files onto
the C: drive, I did repeated CHKDSK's and Norton Disk Tests, and everything
seemed great. I've been using the system with no problems for about 10 days.
NOW THE PROBLEM: I went to boot up tonight and got "Disk Boot Error".
This happened perhaps 2 dozen times. I tried cold boot, warm boot-- nothing
worked. When booting off my floppy the first 3 or 4 times, it said
"Hard Drive Not Initialized". Finally, it booted off the floppy with the
C: drive recognized. I switched over to C: and did a CHKDSK. All was healthy.
I tried running my autoexec, and when it got to run QEGA.COM (the Quadram EGA
emulator, the system hung. After reboot, I tried to run Norton Utilities
to see if it could read the QEGA.COM file, and Norton hung! After re-boot,
I ran Norton off floppy, and it read both QEGA.COM and NU.EXE just fine.
Finally, I tried rebooting off C:, and this time it worked fine!
At this point, I'm going nuts. Is it my imagination? Is it a jinx?
I ran Norton's Dist Test (off the C: drive) in Disk mode, and it had
trouble reading several clusters (ERROR 11, which I think is "ECC corrected
data error"). I stopped it before it finished, and restarted Disk Test in
File mode. It had problems with about 8 assorted files, at many different
areas of the disk. NU was able to read all of these ("Explore disk", then
"Edit/Display Data") without trouble, but one of the file remained unreadable
(it was an archive, and "pkxarc -t" failed).
These are the same kind of symptoms as the original problem as it appeared
on the Priam, except that these don't seem confined to a neat area of the
disk. Further, this disk is BRAND NEW, and the problems didn't show up
when I had freshly initialized and formatted the darn thing. It is wierd
that clusters that were unreadable one time are suddenly readable the next.
Is the problem in the controller card, perhaps? (I believe it's a XEBEC --
it was installed in the system with the Priam when I got it). Do I just
have bad luck with hard drives? Is there some creeping data destruction
problem I don't know about? Or maybe (horrors!) it's a virus?!?!?!
ANY HELP WITH THIS WOULD BE GREATLY GREATLY APPRECIATED!!!! I really
don't know what to do next! Please e-mail responses. THANX IN ADVANCE!
marc
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