Hard Drive Woes

[InTrouble]

A question to all those experts out there:
Computer info:
CPU:Celeron 333MHz
Mobo:Abit BH6
HD: Fujitsu 6.4GB
Vid:Creative Riva TNT
Snd:SB Live! Value
CD-Rom:Ancient CD-ROM (circa '95)
CD-RW: Phillips 24/4/4 speed CD-RW
128 MB RAM

Okay, so a few days back I decided to undertake the near-impossible task of OC'ing my Celeron 333.. I tried for 500 but was denied no matter what i tried.. So I tired 416MHz, with an 83.2 bus speed.. I had read that 416 was unlikely to work properly, because a lot of hardware doesn't like the 83.2 bus speed.. Anyways, it started up at 416MHz just fine, and ran great for a few hours.. Then I shut down and left for a while.. when I came back, got an invalid system disk error on bootup.. Naturally, I thought it was due to the OC'ing, so I dropped the MHz back to 333.. Same error on bootup.. I plopped in my startup disk and loaded up.. did a dir on the C: drive and it was totally scramblfied!! About 200 directories made up of random ASCII characters and a drive total space and free space of about three times what the drive can really handle..

First step:
So I goto town formatting the drive, but it's a no-go.. Fails about halfway through, saying the drive is not ready.. Follow that up with hours of trouble with the bios even finding the drive, and finally I resorted to resetting the bios(via softmenu and battery).. That got the drive to pick back up consistently, but it still wouldn't format. Fdisk, then try to format, still no good..

Second Step:
Seeing that all was potentially lost, I ran fdisk and cleared all partitions off the drive.. then I loaded up my Fujitsu drive manager software and proceeded with a low-level format.. That worked.. I reboot, fdisk, reboot, format.. everything's cool, except both operations take much longer than they should.. I install win, get everything running, scandisk, defrag.. everything is slower than hell.. my processor is up to speed, because things that don't use the hard drive are quick like they should be.. but anytime I need to access the hard drive, It takes about three times longer than It did before this whole debacle..

The question:
What do you think I can do to fix this? What could be wrong? Something I forgot to enable/disable in the BIOS after I reset it? Something with the way I low-level formatted it? Is my mobo shot? my hard drive? I'd appreciate any suggestions..

me

 

[edfair]

First, this is personal opinion. I will take no offense at anybody that has better info or opinions or even shoot me down.
There are communications between the IDE controller and the drive controller in normal use. There are timing issues involved where they don't want to work together, which is what you sometimes find when the hard drive works on one machine but not another. I've run across this several times loading unix stuff.
My attempts at repair would be:1) No overclocking because of potential bus speed issues. 2) Low level on another machine at the lowest processor speed I could find.
3) Re-install on the Celeron and reload from scratch. This might get it back. Next step would be to use another low-level utility and try again. In any case, I think you've done something to the hard drive and not anything on the M/B. Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.com

Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply.

Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[butchrecon]

It sounds as if the Hard drives LOGIC board is now toast. How old is the drive? Fujitsu usally have a 3 year warranty.
As long as you do not tell them that you OC your system.
Second thing is the Controller (HDD) could be bad. Try putting a nother drive in and see if its ok. If it is its you Fujitsu and you can try to get it replaced.

 

[InTrouble]

If the LOGIC board were toast, wouldn't the drive stop functioning altogether..? As I mentioned, I can get the drive to work, but it is running very slowly..

 

[butchrecon]

No not always. Just like any circiut board (Which the logic is)you can have a bad board and still have some functionallity left. Now it could be the IDE controller as well. The easiest way to tell is to place a differant Hard Drive in place and verify that it functions properly.

 

[CitrixEngineer]

I would suspect the Fujitsu software slowing Windows down - are there a bunch of messages saying "Drive x is currently in MS-DOS compatibility mode" or something along those lines?

I would also suspect your initial problem to be due to your overclocked CPU.

This article concentrates on Celeron overclocking - and the page I've linked to describes your situation quite closely; hard disks losing data under overclocking. Read and absorb:

http://arstechnica.com/paedia/celeron_oc_faq5.html

There are also a shedload of useful links on this page.

I hope this information is useful.

 

[bobleona]

Do you have the motherboard cache enable?