Quantum lct20 clicking problem...need help ASAP

[ectimo]

Hi,
I need some info about Quantum Fireball lct 20 (30 Gigz) HDD. A friend of mine bought a Compaq PC 6 months ago, and after a while her HDD started messing up. Today, she got a new HDD from Compaq (for now works just fine), but i have a feeling that the same thing will happened to the new one...
The old one sometimes doesnt get detected by BIOS, sometimes windows doesn't see it (even if BIOS detected it fine), and often it clicks funny (kind of parking heads). After playing with it for about an hour or more, i managed to make it work on my machine, and i got most of important information from it, but after i tried copying some bigger files onto the old HDD(just to see if it will fail again), it clicked again, and the application that i used to copy files just failed... (everything else was running fine, because system was on my HDD).
When i tried to make it run again, it would just click a few times, got detected by BIOS, and that is it... Linux yells at me "KERNEL PANIC: bad block on..."(dont remember the rest) and stops after that line...
Anyway, did anyone else had similar problem, and how to prevent new hard disk drive from failing the same way...
Thanks for any help!!!

 

[eggbert]

It sounds like your drive or drive head is having trouble finding servo. This means that there has been some damage to the head or media and it is performing a multitude of retries (Clicking) to find its starting point. The only preventative measures that can be taken is to make sure that the drive is handled properly during installation and the system is not in a location where it can be bumped constantly or kicked. This type of issue is normally caused by mishandling of the drive either during manufacturing, shipping or installation of the system resulting in physical damage to the head/heads or media.


Egg

 

[ectimo]

Thanks, my guess was the same, but i had similar problems with some other HDD's where API was causing a lot of trouble, and it was fixable by some hardware patch...
Thanks again...