Bad sectors in three new hard drives.

My trusty rusty A7V600 computer got a real clean out two weeks ago with
spiders and dustbunnies being evicted and the CPU cooler removed, cleaned
and regunked.
I have been flogging the guts out of this unit since the A7V600 first
appeared on the market and I thought I may as well replace the hard drive as
it is three years old in May. The old drive tested ok but a new one wouldn't
hurt for more troublefree life.
Replacement was another Seagate Barracuda 40Gb and I cloned the old drive
over to the new drive and away we went. Two and a half days later it crashed
with bad sectors. This drive was replaced with another new drive and two and
a half days later there were more bad sectors in this new drive. This one
was exchanged and the exercise repeated a third time with another crash two
and a half days later. Three new drives and three crashes. I took out a new
80Gb drive this time (Seagate) and one of the lads in the store suggested I
replace my power supply too so I took home a new 80Gb drive and a new
550watt PSU. I cloned the original drive onto the 80 gigger and the computer
has been running just over three days now trouble free. I can't see how a
PSU would cause bad sectors in a hard drive and the three drives in question
were all from different batches so I kind of rule out a bad batch. Format is
Fat32 if this may have any bearing on the matter.
Any ideas anyone?

I experienced this type of problem with sata drives in an array.
The drive would drop out of the array, being reported degraded.
Sometimes it was possible to 'repair' then reinstate the array.
Finally the, branded quality psu blew. Once replaced with a higher pwr psu
no more problems.

"Venom" wrote in message
...
My trusty rusty A7V600 computer got a real clean out two weeks ago with
spiders and dustbunnies being evicted and the CPU cooler removed, cleaned
and regunked.
I have been flogging the guts out of this unit since the A7V600 first
appeared on the market and I thought I may as well replace the hard drive
as
it is three years old in May. The old drive tested ok but a new one
wouldn't
hurt for more troublefree life.
Replacement was another Seagate Barracuda 40Gb and I cloned the old drive
over to the new drive and away we went. Two and a half days later it
crashed
with bad sectors. This drive was replaced with another new drive and two
and
a half days later there were more bad sectors in this new drive. This one
was exchanged and the exercise repeated a third time with another crash
two
and a half days later. Three new drives and three crashes. I took out a
new
80Gb drive this time (Seagate) and one of the lads in the store suggested
I
replace my power supply too so I took home a new 80Gb drive and a new
550watt PSU. I cloned the original drive onto the 80 gigger and the
computer
has been running just over three days now trouble free. I can't see how a
PSU would cause bad sectors in a hard drive and the three drives in
question
were all from different batches so I kind of rule out a bad batch. Format
is
Fat32 if this may have any bearing on the matter.
Any ideas anyone?

Problem there for me is that once a drive has bad sectors it's buggared and
must be replaced. As I said, I wish I would have done one thing at a time so
I could know what the problem really was.


"old man" wrote in message
...
I experienced this type of problem with sata drives in an array.
The drive would drop out of the array, being reported degraded.
Sometimes it was possible to 'repair' then reinstate the array.
Finally the, branded quality psu blew. Once replaced with a higher pwr psu
no more problems.

"Venom" wrote in message
...
My trusty rusty A7V600 computer got a real clean out two weeks ago with
spiders and dustbunnies being evicted and the CPU cooler removed,
cleaned
and regunked.
I have been flogging the guts out of this unit since the A7V600 first
appeared on the market and I thought I may as well replace the hard
drive
as
it is three years old in May. The old drive tested ok but a new one
wouldn't
hurt for more troublefree life.
Replacement was another Seagate Barracuda 40Gb and I cloned the old
drive
over to the new drive and away we went. Two and a half days later it
crashed
with bad sectors. This drive was replaced with another new drive and two
and
a half days later there were more bad sectors in this new drive. This
one
was exchanged and the exercise repeated a third time with another crash
two
and a half days later. Three new drives and three crashes. I took out a
new
80Gb drive this time (Seagate) and one of the lads in the store
suggested
I
replace my power supply too so I took home a new 80Gb drive and a new
550watt PSU. I cloned the original drive onto the 80 gigger and the
computer
has been running just over three days now trouble free. I can't see how
a
PSU would cause bad sectors in a hard drive and the three drives in
question
were all from different batches so I kind of rule out a bad batch.
Format
is
Fat32 if this may have any bearing on the matter.
Any ideas anyone?

Some times the hd manu disk checking utility will repair a hd that has
supposedly bad sectors / problems
I was also able to repair a supposedly bad hd, that failed under similar
circumstances to yours, using various dos utilities to completely destroy
the partition, and then create/format.
As I said the underlying problem seemed to be caused by the psu

"Venom" wrote in message
...
Problem there for me is that once a drive has bad sectors it's buggared
and
must be replaced. As I said, I wish I would have done one thing at a time
so
I could know what the problem really was.


"old man" wrote in message
...
I experienced this type of problem with sata drives in an array.
The drive would drop out of the array, being reported degraded.
Sometimes it was possible to 'repair' then reinstate the array.
Finally the, branded quality psu blew. Once replaced with a higher pwr
psu
no more problems.

"Venom" wrote in message
...
My trusty rusty A7V600 computer got a real clean out two weeks ago
with
spiders and dustbunnies being evicted and the CPU cooler removed,
cleaned
and regunked.
I have been flogging the guts out of this unit since the A7V600 first
appeared on the market and I thought I may as well replace the hard
drive
as
it is three years old in May. The old drive tested ok but a new one
wouldn't
hurt for more troublefree life.
Replacement was another Seagate Barracuda 40Gb and I cloned the old
drive
over to the new drive and away we went. Two and a half days later it
crashed
with bad sectors. This drive was replaced with another new drive and
two
and
a half days later there were more bad sectors in this new drive. This
one
was exchanged and the exercise repeated a third time with another
crash
two
and a half days later. Three new drives and three crashes. I took out
a
new
80Gb drive this time (Seagate) and one of the lads in the store
suggested
I
replace my power supply too so I took home a new 80Gb drive and a new
550watt PSU. I cloned the original drive onto the 80 gigger and the
computer
has been running just over three days now trouble free. I can't see
how
a
PSU would cause bad sectors in a hard drive and the three drives in
question
were all from different batches so I kind of rule out a bad batch.
Format
is
Fat32 if this may have any bearing on the matter.
Any ideas anyone?

"old man" wrote in message
...
Some times the hd manu disk checking utility will repair a hd that has
supposedly bad sectors / problems
I was also able to repair a supposedly bad hd, that failed under
similar
circumstances to yours, using various dos utilities to completely
destroy
the partition, and then create/format.
As I said the underlying problem seemed to be caused by the psu


snip

GRC has an expensive utility SpinRite 6.0 that can sometimes rescue and
repair HDDs.

Some disk checking utilities find a minor problem and mark a whole
section of sectors as bad and 'quarantines" them. Almost all HDDs have a
few bad sectors from the factory. The OP could have run into a bad batch
from his vendor.

About 6 years ago I bought a stack of IBM 9.1G ATA66 HDDs. About 5 or 6
of them failed within 6 months of each other - just out of warranty!

Chas.