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Slave HDD intermittent spin up problems

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markuel

Technical User
Apr 16, 2002
3
US
I have a P3-800 on a Tekram/ 440BX chipset mobo with 256mb ram. I have an IBM 12GB 7200rpm Master with a 40 GB/ 7200rpm Maxtor as slave. I have a CD and a CDRW on the Secondary. I am running Win98SE.

Lately, I have been having problems with the slave drive. Intermittently, when coming out of power saving, the slave tries to spin up, but it doesn't fully make it (by listening, it seems like it is getting close to the proper speed, its like the arm just doesn't swing out). The pc speaker emits two beeps, and the slave drive tries to spinup again. Again, if it does not engage, I get the two beeps. It does this a total of three times. If it fails on all three attempts, it causes Windows to freeze (occasionally, it will give me a BSOD Disk Write error). If I try to warm boot, the HD light stays lit but nothing happens. That is, it won't get past the BIOS drive detection. If I cold boot everything works fine, but Windows Scandisk informs me that an error occurred and that sectors may be bad. It then performs the Thorough surface test (which takes hours). I can bypass this, but everytime I reboot, I get the same Scandisk message. To complicate matters, only once, I received a BIOS error when rebooting that said that the Primary Master and Primary Slave failed.

I changed the ribbon cable and the problem went away for a few months. I opened the computer to clean out the dust (which I try to do every few months). When I closed everything back up, I started getting the errors again. I haven't gotten the BIOS error again, just the failed spin ups. I have checked the SMART status of both drives with SmartDefender (by IBM). It shows no problems. I also used Maxtors diagnostic software. It too found nothing wrong with the drive. I have disabled APM in the BIOS. And I have disabled Power Management in Control Panel. I figured switching to "Alway On" would fix the problem since the HD would never spin down, but I would like to be able have the power saving feature. It had been set to power saving mode for more than a year with this configuration without a problem, so I don't think it is a power saving issue.

I don't think I have an overheating problem. Could I be having a power supply problem? A controller problem? Any information that anyone could provide would be greatly appreciated.
 
this will be the end of your harddrive all this starting and stopping wears on it. I had a harddrive that did exactly that and it died eventually to where you had to slap it to even get the computer to boot cause it wouldnt start spinning on its own... I think the power management is just not good sometimes. maybee just with some drives. I set my power off drives to like 5 hours on my new system... just to avoid over working it..

I donno, but I would BACKUP NOW!!

FatesWebb js error; 67 on line; 36 of signature.class
 
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