HD file corruption problem *&^%$

[cjolley]

I have a strange problem with file corruption on my Seagate st3300631a.
It does not happen on my old 40gig drive formatted fat32.
It seems to happen about every 40 mb moved on the drive.
If I copy a cd image to it the image might have as many as 8 corrupted bytes.
Sometimes it happens to files that are just sitting there!?
eg. Start Nero and it says: Nero has changed, please check for viruses and reinstall.

equipment
Asrock K7S8X
1 gig 333 ram
the drives
dvd burner
dvd player

thats about it

I have tried:
clock down
memtest for 8 hours
seatools drive check
different cables
unplug all the other drives
different partition setup (smaller)

nothing makes it better, nothing makes it worse

I did just noticed that my mb chip is pretty hot, should I get a cooler?

The system is stable, but I'm worried it's not going to stay that way.
Any ideas? It's making me crazy.

Thanks

[cjolley]

Plus piles of anti virus and spyware programs.

(can't seem to edit my original post)

[Technoid]

I did just noticed that my mb chip is pretty hot, should I get a cooler?

Thanks

YES!!

[cjolley]

YES!!

I guess the real question should be:
Should I get one lit by LEDs or not

[Gurm]

Well when you say the system is stable... if your files are getting corrupted, it's not "stable" now is it?

Several things can be at fault in this case:

1. Hard disk.

2. Cabling.

3. Chipset.

4. Drivers.

5. Power.

You've ruled out #2, yes? And you've run the HDD tests from Seagate, so if there IS a problem with the disk, it's an esoteric one. Power can ALWAYS be an issue, so make sure you're getting enough - motherboard monitor is free nowadays. Drivers can be an issue - stick with the windows builtins. And then that leaves the chipset.

The thing that concerns me is that you say it doesn't happen with a different drive. That would seem to scream out that it's the drive, wouldn't it?

[cjolley]

Well when you say the system is stable... if your files are getting corrupted, it's not "stable" now is it?

Iye there's the rub. How long until these byte errors creep into the registry and os files.

1, This is my real guess, but is it defective or just incompatible. And if defective, a; how will I ever find out and b; would Seagate believe me if it pases their tests.
NB the small drive is fat32 the large one ntfs.

2, Not it. I've tried several

3, chipset overheating. may be. big files = lots of dma, and the big drive is ata 133 the small one ata 100. I'll put on a cooler this weekend.

4, switched to MS generic long ago

5, I've a good 450w power supply (I'll check the model when I get home) and my pc is on a 1000w power correcting UPS.

The thing that concerns me is that you say it doesn't happen with a different drive. That would seem to scream out that it's the drive, wouldn't it?

Thats part of the question because it's really the "hd system", for each device, chipset included.

Also odd is that is such a small amount of corruption.
I mean 1 byte in every 40,000,000 ain't much (and at the same time much too much )
In fact, they are isolated single bit errors though. At least the ones I have looked closely at.

I'd rather the offending part just catch fire, so I would know what to replace.

[The PIT]

Sisters got a similar problem. I changed the virus checker and everthign seems to be going much better. However I'm not convinced as she now said word is saying the spell checker isn't installed.

[cjolley]

It's a wierd thing.
I would never have noticed except that I started playing with VMWare Player and started downloading a lot of CD ISOs of different operating systems.
Lots of failed MD5 sigs.
But the images still work.
So I did an fc /b on ones where I had pairs in different drive/directorys with one good MD5 and one bad.
These comparisons showed an average of 8 single bit errors per 500mb iso.

I changed to a different nic, no improvement.
Downloaded the images to different computers and they were fine.
Copy them from CD or USB key drive to my 40gig fat32 drive and they pass MD5 verification.
Copy the same file to the 300gig Seagate and they don't pass because they have these few tiny errors most of the time.

I've even had one that passed when I copied it fail the next day.
WTF!?

[Gurm]

I've even had one that passed when I copied it fail the next day.
WTF!?

That'd be READ errors then.

[cjolley]

That'd be READ errors then.

Or failure to hold the data.
Or part of the file was still in the disk cache on the first go-round?

I ran the MD5 several times and it stayed bad.

Not that I disagree with you, I'm flummoxed.

[Jon P. Inghram]

Did you try the drive in a different computer?

[cjolley]

Not yet.
Last big effort was a re-partition, format and, XP install.
Which is a hassle because a I don't have another drive this big to just swap it out with.
And no extra box that can do 48bit LBA

Sigh...

[cjolley]

Well, I put a copper heat sink with fan on the chipset.
I'm sure it's much more comfortable.
However, it hasn't helped.

I stuck in a SATA controler and may get a new drive for my system tommorow.
Then at least while I'm working out what's wrong with this one I won't feel like Damocles.
$%^&*

[cjolley]

Never got back and reported the outcome.

I talked Seagate into replacing the drive even though it passed their drive test software.
They had me jump through some hoops first of course.

The new drive works perfectly
Been going strong for a couple of months now.

My guess is that there are a lot of people out there with strange computer problems, caused by drives with very low error rates, that they can't get fixed because the drive appears to testing software to be working correctly.

Lesson learned:
Add a test copy of a very large file (~599mb) to your arsenal when a computer acts funky for no apparent reason.

[VJ]

I once had a Hitachi/IBM harddisk that acted up, but their software indicated no problems. However, when I conctacted them, they asked me to mail them the output of their testsoftware (a binary file). After a day or so, they responded: "We have analyzed the log data, and our engineers have found that your drive's rotation is not stable. Send it back for replacement." I must admit I was amazed by that conclusion.

Now, I have a Lacie drive that is acting up; I sent it back for warranty replacement/repair, and just got a call from Lacie themselves (!). Apparently, the drive isn't acting up there, everything is running smoothly. He said they are going to low level format it, have it do some exercise test, and if it all turns out OK, they'll send it back to me.

Before sending back that Lacie drive, I managed to copy the data from it... which I did twice, and then ran a file compare (made a small batchfile). Comparing 200 GB of data took a while, but showed that everything is fine.


Jörg