[clue-tech] Help with 2 hard drives on same IDE

[Roy J. Tellason]

On Thursday 22 September 2005 11:28 am, Angelo Bertolli wrote:
>
> Ever since I ran the diagnostic tools, the drive has been incorrectly
> detected in the BIOS.  No matter what I put in or try to autodetect, it
> comes up to no more than 33.8 GB.  The diagnostic tools even show this
> as 33.8 GB, but for some reason are still smart enough to treat it as a
> 160 GB hard drive.  (By the way, with the BIOS settings, even Linux only
> saw the drive as 33.8 GB.)

Linux doesn't use the BIOS beyond the initial boot sequence.  If linux is only 
seeing that much drive then that's what the drive is telling linux is 
there...

> After setting up a 160 GB partition with the diagnostic tools, I went into
> Linux and ran mkfs.ext3 with a bad block check on the partition.  This time,
> mysteriously, there were no bad blocks, even though last time I got a
> handful at the end.

Drives all have spare sectors on each track and whole spare tracks and it's 
likely that the diagnostic mapped these into use when you ran it.  I had some 
weird kind of glitch a number of years back,  with a box here running dos,  
and involving Norton utilities (one more reason I won't use 'em!),  and it 
showed some "sector not found" errors afterwards.  Once I marked those bad in 
the FAT things ran fine,  and running the diagnostic for that drive at some 
point later on mapped those away,  and some spare sectors into use.

>  From past experiences, can anyone tell me if this means the hard drive
> is just messed up and completely untrustworthy?

I wouldn't be that worried about it at this point unless it's showing you 
other signs of trouble.  The drives I've had problems with here were totally 
inaccesible when all was said and done.

> I'm thinking about using it one last time just to transfer my 80 GB worth of
> data and get an OS on my second drive.  I'm also thinking of just keeping it
> in as a "backup" drive and just running badblocks on it regularly.  Does
> that sound like a good idea?

Probably not necessary.

-- 
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space,  a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed.  --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"

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