OT: Maxtor drive goes under

From: Kent Borg <kentborg_at_borg.org>
Date: Thu Jan 16 09:53:01 2003

On Wed, Jan 15, 2003 at 09:33:34PM -0800, Cameron Kaiser wrote:
> I believe Sellam was cursing at a Maxtor drive a couple months back,
> and now I know why.

I had a fairy new Maxtor 3.5" 60GB drive die recently. I am running
Linux and so couldn't easily run Maxtor's MS Windows-only diagnostic
software, but their web system gave me an RMA number anyway, and
shortly after sending the old one in I got a replacement back. It
seems to work.

As for recovering data, I lost nothing. (And I hadn't done a backup.)
This is because I was running software raid 1. There was a DMA
timeout message in a log file, but the computer kept on running. In
fact, had I not set up a script to check whether a drive died and send
me an e-mail, I might not have noticed to this day that the drive had
died.

As for why it died, I am wondering whether I had something to do with
it. It died *while* I was burning a CD-ROM. The CD-ROM drive was on
the same IDE controller as the hard drive that died. The only thing I
did different from previous times I have burned CDs was I told the CD
to go faster. (I don't do that any more.) I am wondering whether the
CD hiccoughed some too-high voltage back out the ribbon cable. The
drive died in a "kinda work for a while"-mode.


-kb, the Kent who is both impressed and a bit spooked that the drive
failed while he was sitting at the computer and he never noticed a
thing.
Received on Thu Jan 16 2003 - 09:53:01 GMT