OCing produces DEAD DRIVE?

RRLedford · Post by **RRLedford** » Fri Oct 25, 2002 10:46 pm

The HPT366 controller has a history of destroying hdisks as the BP6 gets overclocked. After loosing several drives myself, I hav retired all (3) of HPT366 controllers to no drive duty, or just Read-Only (CDROM/DVDROM) operation. The Promise.Maxtor ATA100 or 133 makes a good replacement.

Post by **Derek** » Mon Nov 04, 2002 2:48 pm

The drive was on the regular IDE plug and overclocking has rendered the drive completely dead? Or is the drive still usable. Just for the record, I have never killed a hard drive by overclocking, but I have corrupted partitions and boot records by doing so.

RRLedford · Post by **RRLedford** » Tue Nov 05, 2002 12:12 am

Before giving up on an NTFS.SYS partition, make sure that CHKDSK.EXE is unable to fix it. I thought my WinXP-Pro drive was hosed & it was repaired in 1-2 Min. by CHKDSK. It took me hours of screwing around to find out I had to install WinXP-Pro on a FAT32 partition of an old drive, so that I could boot from it without NTFS.SYS getting loaded. This allowed the scrambled drive to be connected as a 2nd drive, that CHKDSK could repair. Trying to boot from the bad drive was impossible from the catch22 of NTFS.SYS giving a BLUE SCREEN crash & saying that CHKDSK nreeded to be run - but, no boot=no CHKDSK - no CHKDSK=no boot!!!

Wolfram · Post by **Wolfram** » Mon Dec 02, 2002 3:59 am

relayPoint wrote:I have an older Maxtor DiamondMax I use as a dump device on my BP6 FreeBSD system. (Yes, it slows down the fastest disk subsystem in the west. Shh.) I OC'd my board to a whopping 72MHz FSB (oh gods, that's so fast!) and *BAM*. No more dump device. System won't even BOOT. WTF again. I look in the BIOS, and a 4.3GB DiamondMax, is reporting itself as a 528MB PIO4 drive?

I think it is possible that your drive might be damaged by a high PCI-Bus speed, but I don´t believe it. Are your sure your BIOS has detected that drive correctly before? Try a standard BIOS or plug the drive into some other system. Maybe that´ll help you guess what´s going on... good luck!

Best regards,

Wolfram

RRLedford · Post by **RRLedford** » Mon Dec 02, 2002 11:24 am

Just noticed you said FreeBSD is the OS. What fix tools come with this OS?
With Win2K & XP, a problem on one drive of a multi-drive system can cause the good bootable drive to refuse to boot. You unplug the messed up drive it boots - plug it in again, no boot. This is one reason I consider WinXp the most brittle OS of all the MS offerings.

Snugglebear · Post by **Snugglebear** » Thu Dec 05, 2002 4:29 pm

Wolfram wrote: I think it is possible that your drive might be damaged by a high PCI-Bus speed, but I don´t believe it. Are your sure your BIOS has detected that drive correctly before? Try a standard BIOS or plug the drive into some other system. Maybe that´ll help you guess what´s going on... good luck!

Best regards,

Wolfram

I've seen it happen a few times with other types of drives. It's unusual for it to occur with the regular 440BX channels, but it can happen. FreeBSD's ATA drivers are pretty flaky when it comes to timings, as they expect that bus to be right at spec (either 33.3mhz or 37.5mhz). Normal result would be some garbled data and perhaps some goofy things on the filesystem. It takes a lot more for the drive to flip out and commit suicide (normally the HPT likes doing this).

Anyway, my feeling here is that the maxtor just did what maxtors are good at, and up and died. When drives start reporting jacked data at POST, there are some bad things happening internally. You might try zeroing out the drive and disabling SMART, but I doubt it will help. Nothing freebsd, or any other OS, has can fix a drive that's having firmware or circuitry issues.

BP6.Com

OCing produces DEAD DRIVE?

Re: OCing produces DEAD DRIVE?

Re: OCing produces DEAD DRIVE?