Bob Wright <[log in to unmask]> writes:
>>Steve Snyder <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>> Anyone had experience with the reliability of rebuilt
>>HDs? I'm a little leery now.
>>
>>Steve Snyder
>>[log in to unmask]
>Steve,
>
>The idea here is that you have already gotten 10 months use from
>a new drive with about a 5 to 7 year life expectancy... so they
>are not going to give you a new one to start over... *wink*
And John Chin <[log in to unmask]> writes:
>Not Seagate but Maxtor rebuilts. They seem okay and work
>far better than the ones replaced. I suppose the factory can
>perform a very deep diagnostic and replace the defective
>part(s).
>
>None of my two rebuilds have failed yet (but their brand new
>predecessors have). Hope that ameliorates your misgivings.
Thanks for your words of encouragement Bob and John.
Well, I wasn't expecting a new one, although it would have
been nice. :)
What I can't figure out is that the Seagate worked fine
while it was used as the Slave drive. The Master drive
was (and still is at the moment...) a 420 meg Western
Digital Caviar Model AC2420. When I bought the Seagate,
I also upgraded to a new motherboard and chip (Intel 430VX-
133 Mhz). And upgraded to Win95. I kept the WD as the
master until December. When I first installed the Seagate in
April, I copied (using xcopy32) all the files from the WD to
the Seagate and had intended to keep the WD as a backup.
(Just took me awhile to swap 'em <grin>).
Under this arrangement, I had no problems. It wasn't until I
switched the master and slave drives when problems started
to occur with the Seagate.
Would having the 2 HDs installed together lead to problems?
The original Western Digital HD is 3 years old.
For awhile, things worked normally, then I started to get some
clusters going bad. Usually something strange would happen,
including the system just hanging. Sometimes Ctrl-Alt-Del didn't
even work. When this happened, I would run a scandisk, which
started reporting quite a few cluster errors, unreadable clusters,
damaged folders, crosslinked files, etc.
Each of the Seagate partitions (3 in all) had numerous bad
clusters, according to scandisk. And more clusters went bad
as time went on. The WD had no problems at all.
I started to get numerous page faults and exceptions, and finally one
fateful day, I turned on the system and got the message:
"DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER."
At this point, I had to switch the drives so I could boot off of
the WD drive. I kept the system files on the WD as a backup.
Glad I did. While I think of it, I scanned for viruses several
times and none were found. I could access all of the files on
the Seagate, and was able to back them up. Switching back
to the Seagate as the primary gave me "Invalid system disk."
Reloading Win95 fixed this, for 2 days...
While all this was going on, I had been in contact with Seagate and
they sent me a firmware upgrade, which I ran before reloading Win95.
Whew, hadn't intended to get this detailed. My basic question is why
did the Seagate start to fail when it became the Master drive?
Ideas anyone?
Thanks,
Steve Snyder
[log in to unmask]
Reston, VA
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