I had a Cav. 3.2 in my P5 desktop maybe a year ago. Ran fine
for months (NTWS). Started to fail boot occasionally.
Ran WDDIAG, no apparent problem. Got worse over maybe 4
weeks. Finally failed WDDIAG and WD replaced it. Was lucky
to be able to recover system/data with Partition Magic
before shipping Fine, Fine (defective) device back to WD.
Very massive headache.

It is possible for these drives to exhibit sporadic
evidence of impending failure that WDDIAG is not
capable of detecting. Have you tried running WDDIAG
immediatly after the boot problem? If so, I'd talk
to WD tech. support. They _should_ know that WDDIAG
is not capable of detecting all errors.

Hope this helps a bit ...

  David

-----------------------------
>
> Date:    Sun, 4 Jul 1999 19:56:58 -0400
> From:    "Robert L. Binkley" <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Hard Disk Failure
>
> I have a perplexing problem with a Western Digital Caviar 3.2GB drive.
> Problem first appeared after installing NT workstation on the
> drive.  At reboot,
> the drive has a very high pitched squeal and NT error
> messages about missing files.
>
> From this point, the drive seems to be trashed.
>
> I obtained Western Digital's WDDIAG program and ran it per
> their instructions.
> It shows absolutely no problems with the disk.
>
> Next, I ran the WDDIAG ZERO fill function.  It had no problems.
> Next, I rebuilt the drive starting with FDISK and then
> formatting with WIN95C boot
> disk.  So far, so good.
>
> Installed WIN95C complete and continued to work by installing
> Zip drive and variou
> software.  During the above, it was necessary to restart a
> number of times and
> with each there were no problems.
>
> Turned off the drive overnight.  Next day, powered up and
> there was the squeal
> and this time WIN95 vxd file failures.  Could still see drive
> data if restarted with
> boot disk.  Some files were missing.
>
> The above routines were done on three diff machines, all with
> diff cpu's and motherboard
> types.  All have the same problem with this disk.
>
> This is a new one on me (after working with these wonderful
> machines for 15 years).
>
> Has anybody come across this type of problem before?
>
> Thanks for your help
>
> Bob Binkley
>

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