More hard drive trouble.

[TacitBlue]

Some may remember my secondary HDD keeling over not to long ago, and then the replacement not working correctly. After that I put in one of my old small drives that I had lying around. WELL, now that old drive is behaving strangely and I wonder if anyone can tell me what is going on. Heres what it does: It usually runs fine, but sometimes it starts to make a clinking noise similler to the sound of a turn signal in a car. When it starts making noise, I am unable to use anything on the drive (including FS), even browsing through the folders on the drive causes the whole computer to freeze, but the mouse cursor can still be moved. What is going on? does this sound like its a problem with the drive, or with something else?

[EirePlane]

have you set it properly as a slave and is there anythign stuck in the drive bay?
just a suggestion

[TacitBlue]

Yes it is set up properly as a slave. No there is nothing in the drive bay. It was working fine for at least two months. I Just remembered another detail (don't know how I forgot  ::)) My zip100 drive recently started having problems and got to the point that my system would freeze solid when using it, so I removed it. That is when this hard drive started making noise, and then the freezing started just a little while after that.

[RollerBall]

It's the drive. Beware - you could be about to lose everything on it. I've found this to be a common problem with Fujitsus. I have an old one of my own and one that used to belong to a client (I kept it after selling him a replacement). They both show similar problems to yours. Often they will work fine for a few hours then kerplunk. Sometimes they will come back with a hard reboot but often they won't after repeated reboots. Then maybe they will come back again when they have cooled down. And then disk checking always happens.

In effect the drives are useless or at least, unusable for any serious application where you need guaranteed access to data.

[congo]

BTW Rollerball,

This is the third drive in a row that's having major problems, four drives if you include his zip drive.

Isolate the drive in question and run it on it's own with NO OTHER drives present, no zipdrives, no floppies, no CDROM drives.......NOTHING but the hard disk you suspect.

If the hard disk still appears suspect, then replace it with a known healthy hard disk, if the problem still persists, you know you have either a screwed op sys or a mainboard/cabling fault.

If the hard disk runs fine with no other drives present, then the fault lies with one of your other drives, and this can cause havoc on your system, making it appear as a hard disk fault when this is actually not the case at all.

[RollerBall]

Wooow didn't know that.

Good advice.

Now I'd usually test each one separately in another rig.

[TacitBlue]

Hello all, thanks for the advice. I will definately test the drive in question. I've also gotten the professional opinion of the IT where I work, and he said the drive was probably about to croak. I guess we'll see.

[TacitBlue]

Hello again all. Just an updated for you guys who were helping/advising me: That old drive definately died, so I wqent out and got a brand new Western Digital 80Gb drive and I haven't had any problems out of it yet. I think what happened here was just an amazing coincidence of bad luck in that I had 3 hard drives die in a short period of time, plus a zip drive. So it's all fixed for now and thanks again for trying to help.