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Is my Quantum HDD dying?
When I recently rebuilt my main system, I backed up (using driveimage) my main partition onto a Quantum 20gb ata100 7200rpm I had in a spare PC. This worked flawlessly, no issues whatsoever when backing up or restoring, or when copying 13gb of files (including the backup files that are 2gb each) to another drive.
Last night I went to return the spare PC to service, plugged the Quantum back in, and started getting problems.
Principally, the BIOS on the motherboard would detect it as 20gb, then as 7.5gb after a reboot, then 20gb again.
First thing was I changed the cable for another ATA66 one, then for an ATA33 when that made no difference.
Second I disabled the first IDE controller on the motherboard and plugged the drive into the second controller, still no luck.
Third I tried a cheapo 30gb unbranded HDD, and much to my consternation this worked perfectly, no BIOS detection issues at all.
On the face of it then, my Quantum drive is dying
But even weirder, the Quantum was a replacement for a 4 year old IBM ata66 10gb 7200rpm drive which had stopped formatting properly. On a whim I plugged this into the same mobo, Fdisked, formatted, copied on a CD full of files, and has been running a looping scandisk for the last 14 hours without a hitch!
FYI the motherboard is a TMC TVGa15+ with a AMD K6III/475 and only goes to ATA33.
Last night I went to return the spare PC to service, plugged the Quantum back in, and started getting problems.
Principally, the BIOS on the motherboard would detect it as 20gb, then as 7.5gb after a reboot, then 20gb again.
First thing was I changed the cable for another ATA66 one, then for an ATA33 when that made no difference.
Second I disabled the first IDE controller on the motherboard and plugged the drive into the second controller, still no luck.
Third I tried a cheapo 30gb unbranded HDD, and much to my consternation this worked perfectly, no BIOS detection issues at all.
On the face of it then, my Quantum drive is dying
But even weirder, the Quantum was a replacement for a 4 year old IBM ata66 10gb 7200rpm drive which had stopped formatting properly. On a whim I plugged this into the same mobo, Fdisked, formatted, copied on a CD full of files, and has been running a looping scandisk for the last 14 hours without a hitch!
FYI the motherboard is a TMC TVGa15+ with a AMD K6III/475 and only goes to ATA33.
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