kadie@m.cs.uiuc.edu (Carl M. Kadie) (02/16/91)
The disk drive on my PC has become inaccessable. I would be grateful
for any advice or pointers.
Set up:
I have RLL disk controller (an adaptec ACB-2372c) and two disk drives.
What happened:
I got a new disk drive. I disconnected by old drive and did a
low-level format on the new drive. Then I did fdisk and format. The
new drive looked OK.
Then I reconnected the old drive. When I tried to boot up, I got
messages like "drive error". I could not access either drive.
I repeated the low-level format/fdisk/format on the new drive and
it looked ok again. I don't want to do a low-level format on the
new drive because I'd hope to rescue the information on it.
I have no idea what is causing the problem. If you can give me any
suggestions or recommendations for books or programs (even commercal
programs), I would be very, very grateful. On Track offers a disk data
rescue service, but it cost $200 just for diagnoise. The rescue can
cost $500 to $800.
================ Details ========================
Status:
For two days, the new drive has worked great. The old drive doesn't
seem to work at all. For example, the controller card should be able
to get the drive parameters from the drive (I think). It can get them
from the new (working) drive but not from the old drive.
Tests and Symptoms:
I have tried to diagnoise the problem with a shareware program called
"hdtest". Before running the test, I disabled the bios on the
controller card (making it a dumb controller) and set the drive
parameters in the computer's CMOS.
The old drive was able to pass some many tests, namely, the head
select test, the read/write/verity test, the seek test, and the ecc
test. It also passed the reset disk test, the read sectors test, the
write sectors test, the format cylinder test, the init drive parms
test, the seek test, the alt disk reset, the test drive ready, the
recalibrate, the controller, and the read dasd type.
It failed the performance test:
(message: "Read sector(s) completed with errors - Sector not found
Drive 0, Cmd x2, Status x4
Cyl 0, Head 0, Sector 26, Num sectors 1"
repeated 51 times)
I have no idea what this means.
It also failed the read long and write long tests (the manual
says this may be a bios incompatiblity)
I also tried to do a nondestructive format. At every cylinder
it said: "Format cylinder completed with errors - Bad command
Drive 0, Cmd x5, Status x1
Cyl [the cylinder number], Head 7, Sector 1, Num 1, Num Sectors 26"
Maybe this is this just a bios problem?
I don't understand why HDTEST can see (most?) all the drive, but DOS
doesn't even see the drive.
--
Carl Kadie -- kadie@cs.uiuc.edu -- University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign