DJW <ddwr@hotmail.com> wrote

> Well I went and downloaded Seagate's SeaTools diagnostic software
> and ran the long write to and check the drive. I tried all of the test a
> few times on both drives and other options and the Seagate seatool
> application reported a problem of a failure with the drive in question
> bad sector or something any way got a red dot buy the drive.

Pretty conclusive. If you want more detail, post the Everest SMART
report on the drive. http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=4181

> I got tired of all this and just removed the drive it was rather
> hotter than I thought it should be when I got it out. At least hotter
> than the master drive also a Seagate but half the size was.

Some of the older Seagates did get surprisingly hot.

> The two used drives from ebay showed up in the mail today so I will try them.

> If I get the same problem then I guess its not the drive and will
> have to mess with other stuff I know even less about Bios I guess???.

I'd make sure you have a proper cable select cable
too, those older Compaqs were unusual in that respect,
using cable select even with those older drives.


> Rod Speed wrote:
>> DJW <ddwr@hotmail.com> wrote
>>
>>> Bad Hard drive or doing something wrong?
>>
>> The way to distinguish between those two possibilitys is to run
>> Seagate's diagnostic on the drive and see what it says about the
>> drive.
>>
>> More below.
>>
>>> I bought a used Seagate Medallist 8641 St38641A 8 GB hard drive on
>>> ebay.
>>
>>> I installed it in a Compaq Presario 5204 desktop machine.
>>> Partitioned it with Seagate's latest edition of Disc Wizard
>>> on two floppies made from a download from their site.
>>
>>> All was going well got windows 98SE on it and it booted but as
>>> soon as I started putting applications back on it and restarting
>>> between each install at about 212 MB of data on it, it failed to
>>> boot.
>>
>> Exactly what happened when it failed to boot, exactly what error
>> message ?
>>
>>> Redid it all again and the same thing happened. So I put my old 4 GB
>>> Seagate that came with the machine back in and reset the jumpers on
>>> the 8 GB to non on for slave and as my computer manual says also
>>> set a jumper to cable select to set and put it in the slave
>>> position.
>>
>> Are you using the original ribbon cable ? Those Presarios are unusual
>> in that they use cable select which was unusual for PCs of that
>> vintage.
>>
>>> Did the partition and reformat with disk wizard. Started to load
>>> more
>>> applications on it and somewhere along the line it gave me a warning
>>> at restart that the disk may be damaged. It ran scan disk I guess in
>>> the blue screen DOS mode and when it gets to cluster 121,289
>>> about of a total clusters or 1,048,864 it slows to a ridiculous
>>> crawl.
>>
>> Thats because its retrying on dubious sectors.
>>
>>> And starts to say that portion of the disk is bad and locks out for
>>> use
>>> that section and I guess moves the data to a new area of the disk.
>>
>> Nar, just marks the sector as bad at the file system level.
>>
>>> However this is continuing on cluster by cluster and I ran
>>> it all night maybe 15 hours and it got to cluster 150,000
>>> (something) and is still locking out the areas as bad.
>>
>> You can get that effect if the drive isnt setup properly in the
>> drive table in the bios, when its attempting to access parts of
>> the drive that dont even exist because the wrong data is used
>> in the drive table. You should be using the AUTO entry there.
>>
>>> Now With Seagate's disk Wizard it installed
>>> Dynamic Disk Overlay to I guess both hard drives
>>
>> No, it only gets installed on the boot drive tho it may well be
>> on both drives because both have been used as the boot drive.
>>
>>> in order to see the full 8GB of the slave.
>>
>> Yes, thats quite likely.
>>
>>> I believe way back at first when I tried to use the drive as the
>>> primary
>>> it only saw like 2.1 GB of the drive until I ran the Disc Wizard
>>> application.
>>
>>> The question in all this is do you think I have a bad
>>> hard drive somewhere at 200 MB and beyond
>>
>> Quite possible and the best check for that is to see
>> what Seagate's diagnostic says about the drive.
>>
>>> or is it that the computer being a 1998-99 manufactured
>>> motherboard still can not use the larger capacity.
>>
>> Very likely, but the DDO should get around that. Thats its purpose.
>>
>>> In my computer folder set to view as web page it show 8 GB for the
>>> size for it. I have purchased a few used IDE 8 to 10 GB drives on
>>> ebay that are on the way do you think I will run into the same
>>> problems.
>>
>> If the problem is the motherboard/bios, obviously.
>> If the problem is with the drive itself, obviously not.
>>
>>> And will or should I use Seagate's application to partition and
>>> install the DDO again. One is a Quantum fireball with is now
>>> supported by Maxtor, which is owned by Seagate as the
>>> information I see on line about who owns and supports who.
>>
>> I havent bothered to check if Seagate's Disk Wizard allows for that
>> yet.
>>
>>> Am I basically doing something wrong? Have I missed a step or done a
>>> redundant conflicting thing? Or do I just maybe have a bad Hard
>>> Drive?
>>
>> See above.
>>
>>> One more sideline question of many and it only happens when I am
>>> not doing
>>> anything to or on the slave but I hear it spin down to off is that
>>> normal for a slave?
>>
>> Yes, the default is to spin down a drive on inactivity with SE. You
>> can change that in the settings.