A couple of weeks ago I had a hard drive failure in my UTV. No problem, I took the opportunity to upgrade to a 120GB drive and get extra recording capacity. I was pretty sure that it was a hard drive failure because my UTV displayed all the symptoms described in this forum: booting straight into the WebTV you-must-upgrade screen, light flashes for a very long time on poweroff, etc. Furthermore, I had arranged things so that my UTV had very little clearance around it and was sitting on top of a hot receiver! (What was I thinking?) Unplugging the unit from the power outlet for a entire day did not cure the problem but putting the new drive in did. So this was obviously a hard disk failure.
Well, maybe not. Today, I finally got around to playing with the original WD drive to see whether anything was recoverable. I put it in my computer and was surprised to see that the drive spun up and was detected correctly; often when a hard drive dies (actually the problem is almost always the controller board on the drive these days) it won't spin up or be detected by the computer. Still, the drive can sometimes be detected and still be fried. So I started up dlgdiag.exe to perform a drive test. The first thing it did before doing the test is say that there was some problem with my drive and ask whether I want to repair it? (Unfortunately, I did not write down the exact message.) Naturally, I opted to repair and instantly it reported that the repair was successful. I can't be certain, but I got the distinct impression that the problem was not a problem with the drive itself but a problem with data on the drive or in its CMOS to configure it. After doing this, all tests performed on the drive are successful with no evidence of any problems. So I decided to try the dlgdiag.exe + atapwd.exe technique to unlock the drive without losing the data on it and that was also successful. I'm going to try to recover the data later.
My point is, I suspect that somehow the UTV somehow wedged the drive but it was not actually a drive failure. I wonder how many other people apparently suffering from a drive failure actually didn't need to replace their drives?
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Well, maybe not. Today, I finally got around to playing with the original WD drive to see whether anything was recoverable. I put it in my computer and was surprised to see that the drive spun up and was detected correctly; often when a hard drive dies (actually the problem is almost always the controller board on the drive these days) it won't spin up or be detected by the computer. Still, the drive can sometimes be detected and still be fried. So I started up dlgdiag.exe to perform a drive test. The first thing it did before doing the test is say that there was some problem with my drive and ask whether I want to repair it? (Unfortunately, I did not write down the exact message.) Naturally, I opted to repair and instantly it reported that the repair was successful. I can't be certain, but I got the distinct impression that the problem was not a problem with the drive itself but a problem with data on the drive or in its CMOS to configure it. After doing this, all tests performed on the drive are successful with no evidence of any problems. So I decided to try the dlgdiag.exe + atapwd.exe technique to unlock the drive without losing the data on it and that was also successful. I'm going to try to recover the data later.
My point is, I suspect that somehow the UTV somehow wedged the drive but it was not actually a drive failure. I wonder how many other people apparently suffering from a drive failure actually didn't need to replace their drives?
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