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Phantom drive with errors fixed itself?
Hi to all. I just had a strange problem fix itself, and wondered if anyone had any idea how it happened. I'm running Vista Home Premium with SP1 and keep it updated. Mobo is an MSI K9N Platinum with an AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000 CPU with 2G of RAM, in a Thermaltake Matrix case with a 750W Toughpower power supply. I had a shutdown problem where the computer got to "Shutting Down" and never seemed to finish, and as I wanted to get to bed, I shut down the power. The next day, the system took a long time to boot, but finally did. I looked in Drive Management as I wanted to see that all the drives were okay, and a Disk 2 showed up, unallocated. It was exactly the same size as my Disk L: which is a WD Mybook (500G). I then thought that by shutting off the computer that night, I somehow did something to the Mybook drive, although another entry showed it healthy in Drive Management. After this for several days, I went through a convoluted sequence to boot. I saw that when first turning on the system, the BIOS gave me an error for this phantom disk 2; I had to wait until the system wanted to check the disk for errors, cancel it, wait for the system to load Windows (which it did but not the icons), and then reset the computer, and then wait again for Windows to load...all told about 30 minutes. I Googled "phantom hard drives" and found that this can happen when installing more than one printer with a card reader.....which I just did! I had an HP...and also installed an Epson, and both have card readers. I removed the Epson using the Control Panel, but the computer still took forever to come up, using my sequence above. I figured I'd have to reformat...pull all the USB drives, disconnect the other hard drives, reformat, and re-install Vista. Suddenly, on Thursday, I turned on the computer, heard several clicks, and the system booted fine....probably in less than a minute. Drive Management does not show the phantom disk 2 anymore, and all the other drives show healthy. How could this fix itself? And what could the clicks be....I hear them when I push in the power button...maybe three or four in a row...and then nothing, and several seconds later....a couple more, and then no more until I power on again. The clicks seem too loud to come from one of the hard disks. Sorry for being so long, but this is a strange one for me...any insight would be much appreciated. Thank you. Al |
#2
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Phantom drive with errors fixed itself?
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#4
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Phantom drive with errors fixed itself?
On 9 Nov 2008 06:14:25 GMT, Arno Wagner wrote:
Previously wrote: On Sat, 08 Nov 2008 16:04:41 -0500, wrote: Hi to all. I just had a strange problem fix itself, and wondered if anyone had any idea how it happened. I'm running Vista Home Premium with SP1 and keep it updated. Mobo is an MSI K9N Platinum with an AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000 CPU with 2G of RAM, in a Thermaltake Matrix case with a 750W Toughpower power supply. I had a shutdown problem where the computer got to "Shutting Down" and never seemed to finish, and as I wanted to get to bed, I shut down the power. The next day, the system took a long time to boot, but finally did. I looked in Drive Management as I wanted to see that all the drives were okay, and a Disk 2 showed up, unallocated. It was exactly the same size as my Disk L: which is a WD Mybook (500G). I then thought that by shutting off the computer that night, I somehow did something to the Mybook drive, although another entry showed it healthy in Drive Management. After this for several days, I went through a convoluted sequence to boot. I saw that when first turning on the system, the BIOS gave me an error for this phantom disk 2; I had to wait until the system wanted to check the disk for errors, cancel it, wait for the system to load Windows (which it did but not the icons), and then reset the computer, and then wait again for Windows to load...all told about 30 minutes. I Googled "phantom hard drives" and found that this can happen when installing more than one printer with a card reader.....which I just did! I had an HP...and also installed an Epson, and both have card readers. I removed the Epson using the Control Panel, but the computer still took forever to come up, using my sequence above. I figured I'd have to reformat...pull all the USB drives, disconnect the other hard drives, reformat, and re-install Vista. Suddenly, on Thursday, I turned on the computer, heard several clicks, and the system booted fine....probably in less than a minute. Drive Management does not show the phantom disk 2 anymore, and all the other drives show healthy. How could this fix itself? And what could the clicks be....I hear them when I push in the power button...maybe three or four in a row...and then nothing, and several seconds later....a couple more, and then no more until I power on again. The clicks seem too loud to come from one of the hard disks. Sorry for being so long, but this is a strange one for me...any insight would be much appreciated. Thank you. Al I am replying to my own post....but I counted the clicks.... there are 5...then 2...then 2.... but everything boots okay! Would Spinrite be an appropriate diagnostic tool to use on these drives? My BIOS supports S.M.A.R.T. and it is on. Forget a bout SpinRite. It used to be good...several HDD generations ago. It is basically worthless today. Get a SMART tool and run a long SMART selftest. Also look at the SMART attributes or post them here. The BIOS will only report a failed SMART status, which, given the over-optimistic vendor settings in most drives, goes bad typically far too late. Arno Thanks for the reply....what in your opinion makes Spinrite worthless (not trying to start a war here... but I'm curious as it lists for $89.00 on Gibson's website). I Googled SMART tool and all I got was a bunch of websites about hand tools. Can you recommend one or two please. I'm going to look at the WD diagnostic program from their website; see if there's any tools there I could use. Thanks again... AL |
#5
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Phantom drive with errors fixed itself?
wrote
Arno Wagner wrote wrote wrote I just had a strange problem fix itself, and wondered if anyone had any idea how it happened. I'm running Vista Home Premium with SP1 and keep it updated. Mobo is an MSI K9N Platinum with an AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000 CPU with 2G of RAM, in a Thermaltake Matrix case with a 750W Toughpower power supply. I had a shutdown problem where the computer got to "Shutting Down" and never seemed to finish, and as I wanted to get to bed, I shut down the power. The next day, the system took a long time to boot, but finally did. I looked in Drive Management as I wanted to see that all the drives were okay, and a Disk 2 showed up, unallocated. It was exactly the same size as my Disk L: which is a WD Mybook (500G). I then thought that by shutting off the computer that night, I somehow did something to the Mybook drive, although another entry showed it healthy in Drive Management. After this for several days, I went through a convoluted sequence to boot. I saw that when first turning on the system, the BIOS gave me an error for this phantom disk 2; I had to wait until the system wanted to check the disk for errors, cancel it, wait for the system to load Windows (which it did but not the icons), and then reset the computer, and then wait again for Windows to load...all told about 30 minutes. I Googled "phantom hard drives" and found that this can happen when installing more than one printer with a card reader.....which I just did! I had an HP...and also installed an Epson, and both have card readers. Thats unlikely to be a coincidence. I removed the Epson using the Control Panel, but the computer still took forever to come up, using my sequence above. I figured I'd have to reformat...pull all the USB drives, disconnect the other hard drives, reformat, and re-install Vista. Its normally better to try a restore point since before the install of the printers. And if that doesnt fix the problem, try a repair install, before a clean install. Suddenly, on Thursday, I turned on the computer, heard several clicks, and the system booted fine....probably in less than a minute. Drive Management does not show the phantom disk 2 anymore, and all the other drives show healthy. How could this fix itself? Presumably its getting its brain scrambled about drives due to the card readers. And what could the clicks be....I hear them when I push in the power button... maybe three or four in a row...and then nothing, and several seconds later.... a couple more, and then no more until I power on again. The clicks seem too loud to come from one of the hard disks. There isnt much else that clicks much. Sorry for being so long, but this is a strange one for me... any insight would be much appreciated. I am replying to my own post....but I counted the clicks.... there are 5...then 2...then 2.... but everything boots okay! Would Spinrite be an appropriate diagnostic tool to use on these drives? Nope, no evidence of a drive problem and spinrite is snake oil. My BIOS supports S.M.A.R.T. and it is on. Forget a bout SpinRite. It used to be good...several HDD generations ago. It is basically worthless today. Get a SMART tool and run a long SMART selftest. Also look at the SMART attributes or post them here. The BIOS will only report a failed SMART status, which, given the over-optimistic vendor settings in most drives, goes bad typically far too late. Its unlikely that a drive problem has shown up at the same time you installed the printer, and given that others have seen problems with those printers with card readers, its likely thats the problem. A SMART report on the drives would eliminate the drives but you cant always get a SMART report on a USB drive. Thanks for the reply....what in your opinion makes Spinrite worthless (not trying to start a war here... but I'm curious as it lists for $89.00 on Gibson's website). Its what he lives off. Doesnt make it worthwhile. I Googled SMART tool and all I got was a bunch of websites about hand tools. Can you recommend one or two please. I like Everest myself. The free one wont see the USB drive but the paid one may do. http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=4181 I'm going to look at the WD diagnostic program from their website; see if there's any tools there I could use. Yes, that should work. |
#6
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Phantom drive with errors fixed itself?
Previously wrote:
On 9 Nov 2008 06:14:25 GMT, Arno Wagner wrote: Previously wrote: On Sat, 08 Nov 2008 16:04:41 -0500, wrote: Hi to all. I just had a strange problem fix itself, and wondered if anyone had any idea how it happened. I'm running Vista Home Premium with SP1 and keep it updated. Mobo is an MSI K9N Platinum with an AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000 CPU with 2G of RAM, in a Thermaltake Matrix case with a 750W Toughpower power supply. I had a shutdown problem where the computer got to "Shutting Down" and never seemed to finish, and as I wanted to get to bed, I shut down the power. The next day, the system took a long time to boot, but finally did. I looked in Drive Management as I wanted to see that all the drives were okay, and a Disk 2 showed up, unallocated. It was exactly the same size as my Disk L: which is a WD Mybook (500G). I then thought that by shutting off the computer that night, I somehow did something to the Mybook drive, although another entry showed it healthy in Drive Management. After this for several days, I went through a convoluted sequence to boot. I saw that when first turning on the system, the BIOS gave me an error for this phantom disk 2; I had to wait until the system wanted to check the disk for errors, cancel it, wait for the system to load Windows (which it did but not the icons), and then reset the computer, and then wait again for Windows to load...all told about 30 minutes. I Googled "phantom hard drives" and found that this can happen when installing more than one printer with a card reader.....which I just did! I had an HP...and also installed an Epson, and both have card readers. I removed the Epson using the Control Panel, but the computer still took forever to come up, using my sequence above. I figured I'd have to reformat...pull all the USB drives, disconnect the other hard drives, reformat, and re-install Vista. Suddenly, on Thursday, I turned on the computer, heard several clicks, and the system booted fine....probably in less than a minute. Drive Management does not show the phantom disk 2 anymore, and all the other drives show healthy. How could this fix itself? And what could the clicks be....I hear them when I push in the power button...maybe three or four in a row...and then nothing, and several seconds later....a couple more, and then no more until I power on again. The clicks seem too loud to come from one of the hard disks. Sorry for being so long, but this is a strange one for me...any insight would be much appreciated. Thank you. Al I am replying to my own post....but I counted the clicks.... there are 5...then 2...then 2.... but everything boots okay! Would Spinrite be an appropriate diagnostic tool to use on these drives? My BIOS supports S.M.A.R.T. and it is on. Forget a bout SpinRite. It used to be good...several HDD generations ago. It is basically worthless today. Get a SMART tool and run a long SMART selftest. Also look at the SMART attributes or post them here. The BIOS will only report a failed SMART status, which, given the over-optimistic vendor settings in most drives, goes bad typically far too late. Arno Thanks for the reply....what in your opinion makes Spinrite worthless (not trying to start a war here... but I'm curious as it lists for $89.00 on Gibson's website). SpinRite used to do test-patterns that created worst-case scenarios for the on-disk bit placement. That was with MFM and RLL encoding. These encodings are not sued anymore today and the test-patterns are useless. In addition, disks today to maximum-likelyhood decoding, which also prevents the approach of SpinRite from working. In addition, disks today can test themselves with good precision. They can also report on thery own state with reasonable accuracy by the SMART attributes. SpinRite is basically a waste of money, but it seems there are enough suckers out there to keep the business going. I Googled SMART tool and all I got was a bunch of websites about hand tools. Can you recommend one or two please. I use the smartmontools (commandline for Linux, but a Windows port is available). Some people like Everest. I'm going to look at the WD diagnostic program from their website; see if there's any tools there I could use. Possibly only things that give you a good/bad result but nothing in between (wouldn't do for the customer to call support ans start asking questions....). Thanks again... No problem. Arno |
#7
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Phantom drive with errors fixed itself?
On 9 Nov 2008 23:55:24 GMT, Arno Wagner wrote:
Previously wrote: On 9 Nov 2008 06:14:25 GMT, Arno Wagner wrote: Previously wrote: On Sat, 08 Nov 2008 16:04:41 -0500, wrote: Hi to all. I just had a strange problem fix itself, and wondered if anyone had any idea how it happened. I'm running Vista Home Premium with SP1 and keep it updated. Mobo is an MSI K9N Platinum with an AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000 CPU with 2G of RAM, in a Thermaltake Matrix case with a 750W Toughpower power supply. I had a shutdown problem where the computer got to "Shutting Down" and never seemed to finish, and as I wanted to get to bed, I shut down the power. The next day, the system took a long time to boot, but finally did. I looked in Drive Management as I wanted to see that all the drives were okay, and a Disk 2 showed up, unallocated. It was exactly the same size as my Disk L: which is a WD Mybook (500G). I then thought that by shutting off the computer that night, I somehow did something to the Mybook drive, although another entry showed it healthy in Drive Management. After this for several days, I went through a convoluted sequence to boot. I saw that when first turning on the system, the BIOS gave me an error for this phantom disk 2; I had to wait until the system wanted to check the disk for errors, cancel it, wait for the system to load Windows (which it did but not the icons), and then reset the computer, and then wait again for Windows to load...all told about 30 minutes. I Googled "phantom hard drives" and found that this can happen when installing more than one printer with a card reader.....which I just did! I had an HP...and also installed an Epson, and both have card readers. I removed the Epson using the Control Panel, but the computer still took forever to come up, using my sequence above. I figured I'd have to reformat...pull all the USB drives, disconnect the other hard drives, reformat, and re-install Vista. Suddenly, on Thursday, I turned on the computer, heard several clicks, and the system booted fine....probably in less than a minute. Drive Management does not show the phantom disk 2 anymore, and all the other drives show healthy. How could this fix itself? And what could the clicks be....I hear them when I push in the power button...maybe three or four in a row...and then nothing, and several seconds later....a couple more, and then no more until I power on again. The clicks seem too loud to come from one of the hard disks. Sorry for being so long, but this is a strange one for me...any insight would be much appreciated. Thank you. Al I am replying to my own post....but I counted the clicks.... there are 5...then 2...then 2.... but everything boots okay! Would Spinrite be an appropriate diagnostic tool to use on these drives? My BIOS supports S.M.A.R.T. and it is on. Forget a bout SpinRite. It used to be good...several HDD generations ago. It is basically worthless today. Get a SMART tool and run a long SMART selftest. Also look at the SMART attributes or post them here. The BIOS will only report a failed SMART status, which, given the over-optimistic vendor settings in most drives, goes bad typically far too late. Arno Thanks for the reply....what in your opinion makes Spinrite worthless (not trying to start a war here... but I'm curious as it lists for $89.00 on Gibson's website). SpinRite used to do test-patterns that created worst-case scenarios for the on-disk bit placement. That was with MFM and RLL encoding. These encodings are not sued anymore today and the test-patterns are useless. In addition, disks today to maximum-likelyhood decoding, which also prevents the approach of SpinRite from working. In addition, disks today can test themselves with good precision. They can also report on thery own state with reasonable accuracy by the SMART attributes. SpinRite is basically a waste of money, but it seems there are enough suckers out there to keep the business going. I Googled SMART tool and all I got was a bunch of websites about hand tools. Can you recommend one or two please. I use the smartmontools (commandline for Linux, but a Windows port is available). Some people like Everest. I'm going to look at the WD diagnostic program from their website; see if there's any tools there I could use. Possibly only things that give you a good/bad result but nothing in between (wouldn't do for the customer to call support ans start asking questions....). Thanks again... No problem. Arno Thanks again for your input. Both Arno and Rod Speed recommended Everest, so I bought the Ultimate Edition and will run the SMART diagnostics (a very reasonable $35.00 in my opinion). I want to thank both of you for your help. I can remember Usenet before if became a SPAM dump (early 80's), but it's nice to see that a few newsgroups are still viable and useful. Thanks again. Al |
#8
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Phantom drive with errors fixed itself?
Previously wrote:
On 9 Nov 2008 23:55:24 GMT, Arno Wagner wrote: Previously wrote: On 9 Nov 2008 06:14:25 GMT, Arno Wagner wrote: Previously wrote: On Sat, 08 Nov 2008 16:04:41 -0500, wrote: Hi to all. I just had a strange problem fix itself, and wondered if anyone had any idea how it happened. I'm running Vista Home Premium with SP1 and keep it updated. Mobo is an MSI K9N Platinum with an AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000 CPU with 2G of RAM, in a Thermaltake Matrix case with a 750W Toughpower power supply. I had a shutdown problem where the computer got to "Shutting Down" and never seemed to finish, and as I wanted to get to bed, I shut down the power. The next day, the system took a long time to boot, but finally did. I looked in Drive Management as I wanted to see that all the drives were okay, and a Disk 2 showed up, unallocated. It was exactly the same size as my Disk L: which is a WD Mybook (500G). I then thought that by shutting off the computer that night, I somehow did something to the Mybook drive, although another entry showed it healthy in Drive Management. After this for several days, I went through a convoluted sequence to boot. I saw that when first turning on the system, the BIOS gave me an error for this phantom disk 2; I had to wait until the system wanted to check the disk for errors, cancel it, wait for the system to load Windows (which it did but not the icons), and then reset the computer, and then wait again for Windows to load...all told about 30 minutes. I Googled "phantom hard drives" and found that this can happen when installing more than one printer with a card reader.....which I just did! I had an HP...and also installed an Epson, and both have card readers. I removed the Epson using the Control Panel, but the computer still took forever to come up, using my sequence above. I figured I'd have to reformat...pull all the USB drives, disconnect the other hard drives, reformat, and re-install Vista. Suddenly, on Thursday, I turned on the computer, heard several clicks, and the system booted fine....probably in less than a minute. Drive Management does not show the phantom disk 2 anymore, and all the other drives show healthy. How could this fix itself? And what could the clicks be....I hear them when I push in the power button...maybe three or four in a row...and then nothing, and several seconds later....a couple more, and then no more until I power on again. The clicks seem too loud to come from one of the hard disks. Sorry for being so long, but this is a strange one for me...any insight would be much appreciated. Thank you. Al I am replying to my own post....but I counted the clicks.... there are 5...then 2...then 2.... but everything boots okay! Would Spinrite be an appropriate diagnostic tool to use on these drives? My BIOS supports S.M.A.R.T. and it is on. Forget a bout SpinRite. It used to be good...several HDD generations ago. It is basically worthless today. Get a SMART tool and run a long SMART selftest. Also look at the SMART attributes or post them here. The BIOS will only report a failed SMART status, which, given the over-optimistic vendor settings in most drives, goes bad typically far too late. Arno Thanks for the reply....what in your opinion makes Spinrite worthless (not trying to start a war here... but I'm curious as it lists for $89.00 on Gibson's website). SpinRite used to do test-patterns that created worst-case scenarios for the on-disk bit placement. That was with MFM and RLL encoding. These encodings are not sued anymore today and the test-patterns are useless. In addition, disks today to maximum-likelyhood decoding, which also prevents the approach of SpinRite from working. In addition, disks today can test themselves with good precision. They can also report on thery own state with reasonable accuracy by the SMART attributes. SpinRite is basically a waste of money, but it seems there are enough suckers out there to keep the business going. I Googled SMART tool and all I got was a bunch of websites about hand tools. Can you recommend one or two please. I use the smartmontools (commandline for Linux, but a Windows port is available). Some people like Everest. I'm going to look at the WD diagnostic program from their website; see if there's any tools there I could use. Possibly only things that give you a good/bad result but nothing in between (wouldn't do for the customer to call support ans start asking questions....). Thanks again... No problem. Arno Thanks again for your input. Both Arno and Rod Speed recommended Everest, so I bought the Ultimate Edition and will run the SMART diagnostics (a very reasonable $35.00 in my opinion). I want to thank both of you for your help. I can remember Usenet before if became a SPAM dump (early 80's), but it's nice to see that a few newsgroups are still viable and useful. Many people here give good advice (even Rod does pretty well these days). There are a few tolls, both old and new, as in any respectable newsgroup... Arno |
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