Subject: dead HD

From: [email-masked] (James W. Lynch)
Date: Tue, 20 Aug 1996 08:28:20 -0400

I just installed a new Pentium 100 on a ASUS motherboard.  The first
thing I noticed was an odd sound coming from my maxtor 1 Gbyte drive.
It sounded kinda like a marble on the end of piece of sping steel
being drawn back and released about an inch from a thin steel plate.
It was a sprong - tic -tic tic, not unlike what a head loading and
skipping might sound like on a disk drive.

Anyway, after about 3 hours of testing things and preparing for 
a backup, the system died.  At reboot, the bios caused about
six of the infamous sounds then booted up DOS.  It didn't find
any of the other partitions (other than C).  When I tried to load
linux, it couldn't find the root partition.  I booted with a
recovery disk and ran fdisk and it immediately exited with a
"cant read /dev/hda" message.

I tried Novell Dos fdisk and it hangs producing the sprong sound constantly.
I tried MSDOS fdisk and it quits after a minute or so with an error.

Obviously something has trashed the partition table.  I suspect the
hardware has failed.

Now this is a question that up until now, I'd have thought a foolish one,
but can a Motherboard/IDE controller (onboard) destroy a disk drive?
The drive has been working fine until now, but as soon as I installed the
new MB, it started making the strange sound until it failed almost 
completely.

I don't suppose anyone knows how I might recover.  The reason I swapped
the mother board was because I couldn't get the ftape software to
work properly and finally decided it was because of the mother board.

Thanks,
Jim.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jim Lynch, Sales Analyst,  SGI/Cray Research, Inc. / ARS: K4GVO
Southeast District, Phone: (770) 631-2254, Email: [email-masked]
Suite 270, 200 Westpark Drive, Peachtree City, GA 30269