[plug] hdd problem

[Brad Campbell]

Darren wrote:

> as suggested  i used spinrite to diagnose the drive and indicated a
>problem with drive parameters .the bios was set to auto to detect the
>drive as it always has been .there has never been a problem until now
>,the drive is a dreaded ibm 30gb but was being reported as 640gb ? with
>a lot of unrelated characters displayed when the drive was detected by
>the bios .i changed the bios settings to the ones indicated by spinrite
>and the drive seems to be back up and working fine ,ive never seen this
>happen before all the systems ive played with are set to autodetect the
>drives.id like to understand the fault any ideas what may have caused
>this ? thanks
>
>  
>
I have had this on a dodgy cable or connector. The bios does no checking 
of the data it gets back from the drive on a request info command. So if 
it gets garbage back it just accepts it.
The OS on the other hand checks properly and will retry until it gets 
valid data or times out.

Letting NDD, Scandisk or Checkdisk loose on this type of problem is the 
quickest way to guarantee all your data is lost. Spinrite is my friend.

Glad to be of assistance.
Brad.
Brad.