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Your Hard Drive Will FAIL!Dr. Brian K. Lewis*, Ph.D., Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc.June 2002 |
No,
the title is not an old English curse. It is just a fact of
life. Any hard drive can fail at any time. For the
past five or six years I have managed to escape from any hard drive
failures. However, it finally caught up with me last month.
I had a 2.1GB hard drive that was just more than one year
old. I was working with my computer on a lovely Saturday
morning when I really should have been out working on the lawn.
Suddenly my computer starts making a chung, chung, chung
noise and the drive light is on. So I canceled out of the
program I was trying to load and decided to run Scandisk. I
couldn't get it to load either. So I rebooted and tried to
run a diagnostic disk. That loaded, but it locked up trying
to verify my hard drive. The next time I booted the computer,
the BIOS said I didn't have a hard drive. Total time from the
first indication of problems to final failure was only about 10 minutes.
I had been conscientious in running Scandisk and Defrag on
this drive. There had never been any indication that the
drive surface had any problems. It was quite apparent that
the problem was in the drive electronics. IDE drives contain
their own controller information in the built-in circuit boards.
Although it is unusual, failures can occur in these circuit
boards. How can you prevent this from happening?
You can not. There is no preventive maintenance solution to
prevent this type of problem. So what was the next
step? Obviously, I had to get a new hard drive. I
could have called the manufacturer to have the drive replaced under
warranty. Unfortunately, I didn't have the time available
right then to go through that process. So I bought a new
drive and installed it in my computer. Simple, right?
Now all I had to do is reinstall Win98, all of my
applications and the data files. Yes, I did have a recent
backup, only one-week-old. I also had my financial records backed up on
a floppy from the previous day. So I thought I was home free.
Well, as it turned out, not quite as simple as I would have
liked.
My computer uses an IDE hard drive as its main storage, but I also have
several SCSI drives. That includes my CD-ROM drive.
In order to reinstall Win98 I needed to have a DOS driver that would
access my CD-ROM drive. For SCSI drives you have to get a
driver from the manufacturer of your SCSI adapter card. I did
have a driver and even had it installed on a bootable floppy.
So that should have simplified everything. All I
needed to do was boot from that floppy and start the Windows
installation program.
My only problem was that the SCSI driver would start to install,
identify the CD-ROM and then lock up the computer. Needless
to say this produced more than a little frustration. (A word
to the wise, have you tested your emergency boot disk to see if it
works with your CD-ROM?)
The next step was to get to another computer and go to the
manufacturer's Website where I could download the latest drivers for
the SCSI adapter. Then I installed the new driver on the boot
disk and tried again. This resulted in exactly the same
problem as before. Now, what should I do? Luckily I did have
an IDE CD-ROM on hand. There was an available bay to allow me
to connect it to my computer without removing the SCSI unit.
So I installed the IDE drive and put the IDE driver on the
boot disk in place of the SCSI driver. Success! I
could finally start my Win98 installation. (As an after
thought, I'm still trying to find out why the SCSI driver is
incompatible with my CD-ROM.)
Now came the next problem. The Win98 was an upgrade, not an
original installation. It searched my hard drive for a
previous Windows version. Since it was being installed on a
new drive, it couldn't find any previous installation. The
installation program did give me an opportunity to tell it where it
could find evidence of ownership of an earlier version of
Windows. I didn't want to replace the Win98 CD-ROM disk with
a Win95 CD-ROM. That didn't sound safe to me. I
still couldn't use the SCSI CD-ROM. So I searched my disk
collection and found a set of Win 3.11 original disks. The
install program made me insert each of the first six diskettes before
it was satisfied that I was legal. I think the next time I'll
try to use the Win95 CD-ROM. (Yes, there will always be a
next time.) So I finally did get Win98 reinstalled. Win98
recognized my SCSI CD-ROM and all of my other hardware. Next
I removed the IDE CD-ROM. The final step was to reinstall
programs and data.
I had to have Windows installed on my hard drive since my backup system
uses a removable cartridge instead of tape. And, there is no
DOS version for the backup program. Yes, I agree, that is a
distinct limitation of this backup system. However, once I
finished the Windows installation, I was able to select and restore all
the software that was on my original drive. There were a few
problems with a couple of programs. The Corel Office Suite
would not run after it was restored. So I reinstalled the program from
the original CD-ROM.
Then I had no more problems with it.
I also had trouble with WinFax Pro. When I did my backup, the
auto-receive function was running in the background. As a
result, a number of files were in use and were not backed up.
So I had to reinstall this program to get it to function
correctly. Once that was done, I had no more software errors.
Are there any lessons to be learned from all this trauma?
Obviously I think there are. First, do you have a
current backup and are you staying current by backing up your data
frequently? I know there are some users who say "it wouldn't
make any difference if I lost everything. I don't keep anything
important on my computer." If that's you, then fine.
Just be prepared to restore your application programs from
your original diskettes or CD-ROM. Do you have your original
application disks somewhere you can find them? How about the
serial numbers for programs that require them for installation.
Do you have the DOS version of your backup program or will
you have to reinstall Windows first as I did? Have you tested
your emergency boot disk to see if you can read disks in your CD-ROM
drive? If not, I would suggest you take a few minutes and
test your disk. Just remember that your hard drive WILL fail,
and usually at the most inopportune time.
*Dr.
Lewis, a former university & medical school professor, is a
computer consultant doing instruction, hardware/software services and
system upgrades.
Copyright 2002. This article is from the Sarasota
PC Monitor, the official monthly publication of the Sarasota Personal
Computer Users Group, Inc., P.O. Box 15889, Sarasota, FL 34277-1889.
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