The Tale of the Monster Hard Drive

[kengr]

A week or so back, Doug gave me a 500 gig Western Digital hard drive. It was a PATA (IDE) drive. Since new computers don't *do* PATA anymore, he had no use for it. But since I still use a lot of systems that are old enough to use them, I could use it.

I had another drive I'd had for a while (same model in fact) and since I was running low on space on the NAS (Network Attached Storage) boxes, I decided to plug them into my main box to use for storing some files that weren't as important from other drives.

Things were copying well when all of a sudden an error message popped up about the drive no longer being available.

I went into Computer Management, and did a refresh on the drive list. the 500 gig drive didn't show up anymore. but a "new" drive did show up. It had a semi-random string of ccharacters as a drive label.

And it showed as having two partitions. One of 16 gig, and the other of 2048 gig. (figures from memory, the may be a bit off). I couldn't do anything to the partitions. Got error messages.

I stuck it in my "bench" system and got much the same results. Tried accessing it with a Linux drive partitioning CD. Same deal.

*something* went south. And I now have a drive that reports that it iis a 1.3 *petabyte* drive!


If only...

Comments

[siliconshaman]

It lived long enough it levelled up!

*snerk*

[kengr]

I wish.

I'm trying to scrape together the money for a new HD for one of the NAS boxes. I'd *like* to get a 12 tb, or a 10 tb, but may have to settle for an 8.

ps. that'd be one *hell* of a level up!

[mdlbear]

First thing to try is to rewrite the partition table. If that works, test the heck out of it. OTOH it might not be worth the time it would take.

[kengr]

That's the thing, attempting to make any changes to the partitions fails.

Also note that it is identifying itself as some bogus drive model.

[mdlbear]

Yeah; it's probably a goner in that case. Hard disk platters make nice gongs, clock faces, and coasters.

[kengr]

I've a friend works with young kids. I may give it to her along with a few tools so she can disassemble it to show the kids what the inside of a hard drive looks like.

Somewhere I've got a platter from a *very* failed HD.

I used to work microcomputer support for a fair sized company.

We got called in to replace a hard drive. They hadn't been able to access it for "a while". It was the second drive in the system so it hadn't seemed urgent to them.

It was a tower case under the desk. So I got down there, opened it up and pulled the drive.

I went to put it on the desk and in so doing it passed near my ear while it was changing orientation. I thought I heard a noise. So I moved it back near my ear that torqued it.

Definitely a scraping noise. Oh boy...

So I got the new drive in, closed the case and formatted it. And with a few questions established that the drive had been making "funny noises" for some time.

Got it back to the office and opened the bad drive up. 3 out of 4 heads weren't there anymore. Fair bit of aluminum dust. And groves you could not only see, but *feel* worn into the platters where those 3 missing heads had been.

I kept one of the platters, another one of the the techs kept the other.

I did take it back to that office and explain what the "funny noises" had been and suggest that they contact us the next time a computer started making "funny noises".

[stickmaker]

That reminds me of a computer professional I used to game with. He had a platter from one of the old, mainframe hard drives in a prominent place on his wall. He liked to point out the tracks left when the heads crashed.

[kengr]

I've got a platter from an IBM minicomputer. I also have two disk packs for an IBM 2311 hard drive (think 1970s)

No crash marks on either.

That drive I've got the really messed up platter from had essentially crashed, and then been *run* while crashed for months. Not only wore grooves (trenches!) in the platters but eroded away the heads.

[stickmaker]

As a transportation engineer I recommend paving it with hot asphalt cement concrete. :-^)