Does anyone know of a program that will do an in-depth diagnostic of a hard drive?
My secondary drive has been giving me problems and Norton2001 doesn’t find anything wrong with it.
(By the looks of things, the drive seem sto have trouble reading the FAT from time to time…it takes much longer to get the info that it used to. It sometimes results in and “error reading/writing to drive D:”)
Why don’t you try the Windows scandisk. That is quite a good tool to diagnose your hard drive. I have just used it to get me out of trouble when I accidently jarred by company laptop when it was running. Using scandisk the faulty segmants (32 out of 65,000) were identified , the data in the faulty segments were moved and everything returned back to normal. It did take over 7 hours to do this but it was well worth it.
Based on almost 13 years of messing around with IDE drives, IDE drives that start to give incipient hardware problems that can be assigned soley to the drive should usually be serviced or tossed out ASAP. Once an IDE drive starts to go bad it’s usually the beginning of an increasing rapid downhill slide with lost data tears at the end.
Most drive manufacturers websites have small DOS and non-DOS floppy based drive setup/diagnostic utilties for DL that will check your drive controller and media, however, any drive diagnostic short of the quasi-professional types like Spinrite etc. may not be able to stress the drive enough to make it act up. Setup/diagnostic utilties for IBM/Quantum/Western Digital/Maxtor/Seagate etc should be available on these sites and are usually re-badged Ontrack utilites.
Sometimes (for whatever reason) a drive that was partitioned on another system will misbehave. I have seen this once or twice and a complete scrub of the drive down to deleting the partition, re-booting and having the drive re-recognized by the BIOS then re-partitioning and re-formatting et al under the new system set things right.
I’ll second astro’s opinion. That makes for 25 years of experience with IDE drivers saying that once they start to get flaky, toss 'em. One side note: If the drive is less than three years old, assuming it is Seagate, Conner, Maxtor, WD, etc, it should still be under the original three year warranty. Use the DOS CHKDSK command to see how many currently-mapped bad blocks it contains. If there is a significant number, warranty service is pretty easy to obtain; just report a growing number of bad blocks as your problem.
Most of my warranty issues have been with SCSI drives, which generally carry a five year warranty. Three years is pretty universal for IDE drives.
I am judging from the OP that it was working just great at one time in the same installation.
DC, Norton Disk Doctor is an improved version of Microsoft’s Scandisk (since Microsoft acquired the original Scandisk software under license from Symantec in 1994).
IBM has “Drive Fitness Test” software available for download to a bootable floppy which you can use to test an IBM drive. Seems pretty comprehensive to me.