[vox-tech] failing hard drive...

[Ted Deppner]

On Fri, Dec 08, 2006 at 11:52:19AM -0800, Jonathan Stickel wrote:
> before; I guess I have been lucky.  The hard drive is a 160 GB Maxtor 
> ATA drive purchased and installed in a custom built desktop pc a few 
> years ago (2003?).

Maxtors typicailly have a 3 or 5 year warrantee... this might be worth
looking into.  Maxtor will also cross ship, giving you 30 days to move
your data onto the replacement before you send the failed disk back.

> So I must have bad sectors somewhere in the physical region of the first 
> partition.  Will this problem get worse and propagate to my other 

Yes, typically it'll only get worse.  Soft sectors will continue to worsen
until they're a hard failure.

> partitions?  I see several non-free programs on the web that advertise 
> recovery of bad sectors.  Does anyone know about these?  I'm not about 

I'd guess these are editting the bad sectors map, but that's something you
only really ever want to do on a new hard drive, or if your bad sectors
map got lost (yes, I had this happen once).  If the map is lost,
essentially you "gain" sectors in the wrong places, and the hd becomes
totally unusuable because there's extra blocks.  I doubt you've any
problem with the map.

> to drop $50 for software that /might/ fix my drive when I can go buy a 
> replacement drive for $50.  So my last question(s):  any recommendations 
> for a replacement drive?  Are Maxtor drives considered "low end"?  I'm 
> stuck with PATA since my motherboard does not have SATA.  I bought it 
> just before that technology became standard.

I like Seagate, Western Digitial, IBM drives, and Maxtor, roughly in that
order.

-- 
Ted Deppner
http://www.deppner.us/