[Nottingham] Computer woes

[Alex Tibbles]

An easy way of preventing the OS from doing much to
the drive is to boot using the wondrous Windows 98
Diagnostic disk. DMA? It doesn't support it. Caching?
Ditto.
I have a Maxtor 80GB (1 year warranty -> 14 months
use) which was my data disk. I have retrieved files
(my self-assessment accounts too - why didn't I make
backups?) by booting off the 98 floppy and not doing
any unneccessary reads from the disk. My pet theory,
judging by the noises it makes, is that whatever stops
the heads going over the edge of the drive has failed
(The drive makes a click-click-click noise). BUT, I
can use (bits of) the drive, but not W*nd*ws 2000
(havn't tried linux on that machine).

I have no idea if that helps - good luck.

alex

> Things to try ...
> 1. Either remove all references to hdd partitions
> from fstab etc or boot from a rescue floppy/cd.  You
> want disk access under manual control.
> 
> 2. Use hdparm to pare the disk extras back to slower
> access modes (eg udma2,mdma2 then no DMA)
> (Do read 'man hdparm' first if you haven't.  It is
> like 'dd', a good tool but sit on your hands and
> re-read what you have typed before you hit return :)


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