Hdd Struggles, Fails

[rale]

My new Maxtor 6E040LO (41g) struggles - as if it is repeatedly trying and failing to read data. While it is struggling the hdd led flashes on and off and the system is frozen. Usually it eventually succeeds (5 to 30 seconds), but sometimes it does not & I have to do a physical restart.

This drive is about 1 week old and is a replacement for an identical drive that had the identical problem (except that the 1st took about a month to develop this failure). I had a very similar, if not identical problem with a fujitsu 10g drive.

Activesmart (hard drive monitor/diagnostic) shows "ultra ata crc error count = 1 - normal is 200?, failure threshold is 0.

The Maxtor diagnostic program, Powermax, shows no problems, except "Bios Extension Support - Failed". The Maxtor support people can't tell me what this means. The Fujitsu diagnostic program, fjdt_6.exe, shows no errors.

I suspect, therefore, that the problem is in the hardware or software environment, which is:

Hardware

mainboard MS 6340 w/ 1.2ghz AMD Duron
Via KMa33/KM133A chipset
ram 128m
Graphics Card RAGE LT PRO AGP 2X (English)
HDD-0 maxtor 41g as primary master
HDD-1 None or various (makes no difference) as primary slave
cdrom None or various (makes no difference) as secondary master
cdrom None or various (makes no difference) as secondary slave

Software

bios award v6.00pg
OS Windows 95 4.00.950 B (yeah, yeah, red flag)
Amdk6upd.exe updates win95 for AMD processors
usbsupp.exe
via1435.exe or viahyperion4in1445v.exe or (+) via_idefilter120a
w82560en.exe (ati agp video support)
W95ws2setup.exe winsock2
cc32d479.exe netscape 4.79
activesmart231.exe hard drive monitor/diagnostic

various other that probably have no effect on this problem.

Any Ideas or suggestions?

Robert Allen Leeper
rale@hcsmail.com

 

[Rob2806]

The problem may be your OS. I don't think Win 95 is happy supporting a 41GB hard drive.

 

[xhaya]

i'm not exactly sure here but i do remember that win95 supports up to 20g?
but since you had an identical setup before....

have u tried a reformat?

hope helps
xhaya

 

[rale]

Thanks to Rob2806 and xhaya.

Win 95 may be part of the problem, but I had an identical problem with a 10gb fujitsu. The problem only showed up about 2 months after I upgraded to the ms6430 mobo & 1.2 ghz Duron.

I have reformated, including a pseudo-lowlevel format.

It seems to me that the problem must be related to the SMART attribute "ultra ata crc error count" which rises to about 192 after a reformat, but drops back to 1 after a few accesses.

(incidently, the model is 6E040L, not 6E04OL as I said first)


Thanks,

RAL [8-27-3, 10:13pm edt]

 

[edfair]

Probably would set it up to allow boot to DOS environment and using a ramdrive with some of the memory do some shakedown of the drive by shuffling things on and off via a replicating batch file to see if there are problems at the hardware level.
Then run the same things under 95 to see if there is a difference. May pin down 95 dhipset driver problems.
There have been problems with VIA chipsets noted in the past where the solutions have been to update the drivers. Don't have any specific details but you might try a google search with the chip identifier to see if there might be a hit.

Ed Fair
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.