Anyone have experience using a hard drive mobile rack?

To start my little tale of woe, a hard drive I was running in the mobile rack went bad. I knew it was bad when I saw this:

The drive is 1 of 3 partitions on a drive on my main system, labelled F. I did Scandisk on the other two, E and G, they were ok, although I didn’t do a surface scan, and the last time I had a problem with “data error while reading” the drive had bad clusters, so I don’t know…

The F drive is still navigable under Windows, and has remained so since the problem began. I’ve opened a bunch of different folders in it, opened up some text and picture files with no problem. There are multimedia files on the disk as well, I’ve been too nervous to try one of them.

The hard drive with this partition on it is, as I said, in a mobile hard drive rack. A few days ago I had a problem where the system seemed to be having a problem accessing the drive. There were repeated attempts to access followed by a little clunking noise.

That had happened once before though, since I got the mobile rack. I did like I did before. I just stopped the process, shut down the system, removed the tray and reseated the drive in it, put it back in and booted back up, and the problem seemed to be solved.

A short time later I noticed that the available space on the drive was being reported incorrectly, when I tried to extract a large file in a Winrar archive onto the drive. The process failed for lack of space, although Windows reported more than enough.

So I tried Scandisk, and ran into this problem. This was Scandisk in DOS. When I tried running Scandisk in Windows, it was actually able to skip over the FAT part, and do the rest of the Scandisk. It found one error, converted ~400 megabytes of something to a .CHK file.

It suggested I do a surface scan. So I started it, and it was able to tell me specifiically about which clusters it could not read. Then it started reading segments (I’m not sure if I’m getting the nomenclature right here, clusters, segments, I can’t quite remember. It’s the stress).

It appeared to be hung up very early, so I escaped out of it. A full surface scan would take forever anyway, and I already have a pretty good idea that the disk is hosed.

So…I took the bad disk out of the mobile rack. Replaced it with another one, only a few months older. Partitioned the same way, E, F, and G. Booted up, everything seemed fine. Browsing around this disk, I opened up a largish Winrar archive on drive E, and…it started having that same problem…tries to access, little clunk noise, tries again, clunk again.

I powered down in a panic. Took the whole mobile rack assembly out, and put in just the hard drive. Booted up ok again. Everything seemed ok.

Went back to that Winrar archive. This time it opened up ok. But…when I tried to open another archive in the same folder, I got a data error reading one of the archive files.

Rebooted to DOS. Tried to Scandisk drive E. Couldn’t because…according to DOS, there was no E drive.

:eek:

Rebooted back to Windows. There’s the E drive, still navigable. Back to DOS. This time there’s an E drive, so I Scandisk /checkonly. It runs through, and at the end tells me there were errors, I need to run it without the /checkonly.

So I do…and there are no errors.

I boot back to Windows, go back to the E drive, back to that Winrar archive, and…this time, no data error.

Numerous other Winrar archives in the same partition, I try opening a bunch of them. No errors there either. Picture and text files I open work fine as well.

The next day I rebooted to DOS and did a Scandisk on drive E with a surface scan. Took three hours. The partition is totally clean, no bad sectors.

I suppose I could also do that to the F and G partitions, but the E drive is where I had the data read error.

So I’m guessing the problem was with that mobile rack. I never heard that “clunk of death” except when I was using it. Even when I was having access problems when I put that other drive in without the rack, there was no clunk.

So what happened? Why did it work so well for so long, and then crap out on me?

It was such a cool toy, too. Cheap, though, maybe I should try getting something better quality…

Anyway though, if anyone has had any kind of similar experience using a mobile hard drive rack, I’d really like to hear about it.

Also, about that bad hard drive…it’s hosed, but how hosed? As I mentioned, I was able to navigate the folders, and open a bunch of small files on the drive. You wouldn’t have known there was a problem. I’m hoping that my data will be recoverable, at least most of it. But what’s the best way to proceed here?

The system is Windows 98SE, the drive that went bad is a 120 Gb Maxtor I picked up at Staples just a few months ago. The other drive is also a 120 Gb Maxtor I picked up at Staples, a few months before the other one.

The first thing I would do is see if you can transfer your data to another hard drive (if you have space).

If this works, then try repartitioning and formatting the drive in question.

I’ve kept all my drives in mobile racks for the last 5 years and have never had this problem. I have had partitions in FAT32 flake out on me. Most of the time moving the data off the drive and repartitioning/formatting does the trick.

But, that’s not to say you don’t have a hardware problem with the rack.