On Monday 25 September 2006 17:16, Les Mikesell wrote: > On Mon, 2006-09-25 at 09:08 -0400, Lamar Owen wrote: > > Power supply issues can do real damage to the drives, as well. I had a > > pair of 250GB drives that have hard errorred sectors thanks to a power > > supply 'glitching' on me. The drives still work fine otherwise, but they > > have several dozen sectors each that will never be usable. > > Most drive manufacturers have a diagnostic/repair utility that have > a fair chance of fixing that sort of problem. Unfortunately they > tend to only run under windows. The larger manufacturers have bootable floppy images for most of this sort of thing; most are included with the UltimateBootCD; no Windows required. The Maxtor, Seagate, and Western Digital utilities can do the low-level sparing needed; in my particular case, the Maxtor diag's sparing routine wasn't able to spare enough sectors, and thus I have irrepairable surface damage; no more spare sectors. But the drive, once badblocks is run, works fine and passed some heavy load testing and data integrity testing (again, when badblocks was run during the mke2fs run using -c). SMART is not a happy camper, though, reporting that the drive's death is imminent; as it has been for the last year that the drive has been in service..... Unfortunately, this particular 250G Maxtor was a retail drive with only a single year's warranty, and was ten days out of warranty when my power supply ate it. But, really, Maxtor shouldn't have to replace a drive that died due to my cheap power supply, anyway. -- Lamar Owen Director of Information Technology Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute 1 PARI Drive Rosman, NC 28772 (828)862-5554 www.pari.edu