The Drive, She Died.

For the past week my home desktop (running Vista x64 at the moment) would periodically lock up to the point that I’d have to completely power cycle it. This weekend I finally took some time to try and see what was going on.

Initially, I was thinking it might be related to heat and the latest video card I had swapped in a few weeks back . However, switching back to the previous card made no difference and I locked up shortly afterwards.

I also noticed I was locking up more often and quicker after powering up.

At one point I had just finished logging into Vista and was in the Explorer looking over the drive contents to size up what apps I had and ponder possible software conflicts. Suddenly the drive disappeared just as the machine locked up! Ah ha, a clue.

Rebooted, drive was there again. Launched My Computer and watched it disappear again a little bit later. Popped into the BIOS and saw the SATA channel disabled. Yikes. Re-enabled it and repeated the cycle above.

Fired up SpinRite, but it panicked and wouldn’t touch the drive. Seems it was running *very* hot (60 C). I wonder if that (or S.M.A.R.T.?) are what disabled it in the BIOS?

Now, I should make a small confession: This particular drive was pretty old. I got it used over 3 years ago. Seems a RAID controller had marked it as failed… I replaced it in the mirror, then spent some time testing it and all seemed fine. SpinRite loved it. However, the controller wouldn’t take it back so it came home with me. Been flawless since then – well, until now of course. In other words, this was probably a bit of a time-bomb anyways.

OK, moving along…

I connected it to a USB to SATA/IDE adapter and managed to get a few more files from it, but it shortly went completely dead. Even put it in the freezer overnight. Now the drive will spin up, but neither Windows nor several Linux distributions can recognize anything on it anymore.

Some good news: I was able to replace it with something larger for about $50. I also had good backups so haven’t lost any data.

The bad news: A lot of my windows apps were installed on that drive. Windows ain’t happy anymore.

Time to reload. But what OS? Windows 7 RC? Back to Ubuntu or Fedora Core? Vista x64 again? Something to ponder today.

Possibly Related posts:

1. Gosh Darn, I’m Worth It
2. Performance Tip of the Day