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HDD 'died' cyclic redundancy error

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Franc Zabkar

Jan 1, 1970
0
Oddly cmd.exe and command.com behave slightly differently under xp, but they
both do the same thing.

All the references I can find say that one should use cmd.exe wherever
possible and that command.com should be used only for DOS apps that
have trouble running under XP. One major difference appears to be that
the latter doesn't support long file names. Another is that XP batch
language is much more powerful than that afforded by command.com. In
any case, cmd.exe is XP's native CLI, and command.com is for Win9x and
DOS.

- Franc Zabkar
 
M

Michael Kennedy

Jan 1, 1970
0
Franc Zabkar said:
All the references I can find say that one should use cmd.exe wherever
possible and that command.com should be used only for DOS apps that
have trouble running under XP. One major difference appears to be that
the latter doesn't support long file names. Another is that XP batch
language is much more powerful than that afforded by command.com. In
any case, cmd.exe is XP's native CLI, and command.com is for Win9x and
DOS.

- Franc Zabkar



I assumed that command.com was included for legacy support as you have
confirmed.
 
F

feebo

Jan 1, 1970
0
Never seen this before.

A HDD of mine (IBM Deskstar 20GB IC35L020AVER07-0) 'died' when I restarted
Windows (XP btw FWIW). Windows shut down OK seemingly but wouldn't restart.

It totally 'locked up' the PC with no error message. Never seen anything quite
like that before so it took me a little while to pinpoint it. The BIOS found the
drive OK btw.

Anyway, I got things sorted and then re-attached it as a secondary drive.

Trying to look at it, Windows Explorer 'froze' for a bit but it did load a drive
icon eventually. However Windows Explorer was of no further help.

I then used XP's command.com and got the cryptic message 'cyclic redundancy
error'.

Any ideas what's up ? Is the drive destined for silicon hell or is it
recoverable ? I'm wondering if the system area's data's been trashed for
example.

Graham


go to grc.com and buy SpinRite - well worth the money ($19 ish???). It
has various different recover methods and will sample damaged sectors
hundreds of times (if necessary) and use statistical analysis to
rebuild damaged blocks. It can take days on a deep dive, but if the
data is that valuable...

You should still replace the drive once it is recovered so clone the
disk onto a new one but this has saved my arse and that of lots of my
customers many times. People know they should backup stuff but most
don't. Spinrite has only been <100% effective on two occasions but
that was down to drives with cascading failures - prolly cause the
flying height of the head was compromised - dust or sunnik got loose I
reckon. It can handle your CRC error by sampling the sector many times
and rebuilding the checksum. Might take a day or more so be prepared.
It did with a 120G IBM deskstar that I recovered a while back.

Take the drive out of the current machine and put it in a known good
machine - just in case hardware faults associated with the motherboard
in the original machine are ensuring data is written badly - I have a
micro ITX board that does this - I keep it for what I don't know -
maybe I'll put a SATA card in the single PCI slot :eek:)

Spinrite comes as an ISO image that you burn to a cd and then boot. As
it is looking at the structure of the data as written to the disk, it
doesn't care what format it's in (on the deepest dive that it).

HTH

F
 
F

feebo

Jan 1, 1970
0
All of which are brands history has noted for premature failure.

There's only one brand of HDD I learned to trust and that was Quantum.

Graham

hmmm... not convinced on the maxtor side of things... I have read
loads but I use lots of maxtor kit and have only had a single drive
fail (80G) years back.

Most of the systems that I use/put together use RAID5, 10 or at the
very least 1. So a single failure isn't an issue so long as you deal
with it quick enough and not just sit on it like one customer. "Oh
that red light has been on for months but it all seemed OK" Struth!

Maxtor comes with 3 year warranty so any that fail in a RAID setup
would be replaced no probs and if they fail after the 3 years, who
cares? prolly long overdue for bigger, better, faster drives anyway.

F
 
B

bz

Jan 1, 1970
0
Thanks for the input. There's nothing on it of such value that I can't
live without it !

I am however curious since I've not come across such a fault before and
I'd like to attempt a fix if only as an exercise.

I've never previously 'lost' or needed to 're-install' an installation
of Windows you see. Short of total mechanical/electrical failure I'd
like to maintain that record.
I use r-studio to recover data.
Left one drive running last night. Lots of bad sectors 'unable to read
after 10 retries'.

The computer seems to freeze when it is accessing such a drive.
It may take several days to finish making an image of this 76 GB drive.

Then r-studio can scan the image and recover files [except for the data
lost on the bad sectors, of course.

I usually make an image first, for several reasons:
1) it preserves the hard drive for further tries
2) it is faster to recover from the image when there are lots of hardware
failures.
3) you can try different sectoring schemes to recover data when the
directory has been trashed.

As for fixing the drive, a low level format might 'fix' the drive by
teaching it to ignore the bad sectors, but if it has been losing sectors
due to mechanical damage to the disk surface, the problem will continue to
get worse. The drive is unreliable.

Check the mfg web site, the drive may be in warranty!
You may get a free replacement drive.

If the data on the drive is very valuable, there are companies that will
recover data, even from damaged drives. It isn't cheap.

I remember a company in canada that would return the drive repaired with
data recovered for a flat fee of less than 1000 dollars [no charge if they
couldn't recover your drive].




--
bz 73 de N5BZ k

please pardon my infinite ignorance, the set-of-things-I-do-not-know is an
infinite set.

[email protected] remove ch100-5 to avoid spam trap
 
P

PhattyMo

Jan 1, 1970
0
Eeyore said:
Never seen this before.

A HDD of mine (IBM Deskstar 20GB IC35L020AVER07-0) 'died' when I restarted

You mean an IBM Deathstar? They're notorious for dying.
Just tossed a couple dead 60G's...
 
E

Eeyore

Jan 1, 1970
0
Franc said:
Eeyore put finger to keyboard and composed:

I don't use Windows XP, but I know that its command interpreter is
actually cmd.exe.

What's this then ?

Type of file: MS-DOS Application
Description: command
Location: C:\WINDOWS\system32
Size: 49.4 KB (50,620 bytes)


Graham
 
E

Eeyore

Jan 1, 1970
0
Spurious said:
Could you make any more of a nebulous remark? For one thing all drives
eventually fail. "Premature failure" is about as off the wall as it
gets.

In the case of Seagate, a case I well remember, both the original SCSI Barracuda
drive I'd bought *and* its replacement died with a month of installation. I
certainly call that premature.

Graham
 
E

Eeyore

Jan 1, 1970
0
Clint said:
Eeyore writes

Get a copy of Spinrite. It works for errors like the one you have. There
are other tools which are for filesystem corruption and lost
files/partitions but it sounds like you have something a little 'lower
level' than that.

Ah yes. I've seen that at grc.com.

I didn't know it did stuff like that. Thanks.

Graham
 
E

Eeyore

Jan 1, 1970
0
Franc said:
"Michael Kennedy" put finger to keyboard and composed:

All the references I can find say that one should use cmd.exe wherever
possible and that command.com should be used only for DOS apps that
have trouble running under XP. One major difference appears to be that
the latter doesn't support long file names. Another is that XP batch
language is much more powerful than that afforded by command.com. In
any case, cmd.exe is XP's native CLI, and command.com is for Win9x and
DOS.

Maybe so but I've always used command.com and it works just fine.

Graham
 
B

Brandon D Cartwright

Jan 1, 1970
0
All IBM drives are STILL called IBM drives.

ALL NEW drives made in said IBM facilities are now called Hitachi
drives, since Hitachi bought IBM's HD manufacturing arm and related
technologies.

Good to see you behaving yourself.
Keep it up!
 
S

Spurious Response

Jan 1, 1970
0
Umm, actually, XP has command.com as well.


Uh... command.com is the old DOS command interpreter.

cmd.exe is the NT "DOS Virtual Machine" shell.

Different command interpreters can be invoked from within this shell,
including command.com
 
S

Spurious Response

Jan 1, 1970
0
hmmm... not convinced on the maxtor side of things... I have read
loads but I use lots of maxtor kit and have only had a single drive
fail (80G) years back.


While I have had loads of Maxtor failures, and would never buy another.
Yet Seagate just bought them.

Just proves his stats are bull. ALL drive makers have drive failures.
Including his precious make.
 
S

Spurious Response

Jan 1, 1970
0
In the case of Seagate, a case I well remember, both the original SCSI Barracuda
drive I'd bought *and* its replacement died with a month of installation. I
certainly call that premature.

Did Seagate promptly replace them for you?
 
E

Eeyore

Jan 1, 1970
0
Spurious said:
Did Seagate promptly replace them for you?

I should damn well think so. They had 3 year warranties.

Graham
 
M

Meat Plow

Jan 1, 1970
0
I'm keen to explore Linux but my results to date haven't been very promising. It seems
to me that the much-touted 'live' CDs require a fairly modern PC to run. The trouble
is that they give no indication of whether or not the PC can support it or not.

I will keep trying though. I have another 'box' in mind.

I run Kubuntu Edgy on an AMD Athalon 64 desktop and an Asus widescreen
laptop (Intel Centrino). Edgy installed with no intervention on my part
on the laptop. I had to manually switch the X window source on the AMD box
to support the embedded NVidia graphics hardware's acceleration. Funny
thing is that I had all kinds of trouble reinstalling XP on this AMD 64
because it's an E Machines made by Gateway and the proper chipset drivers
were buried deep on the web site of the motherboard manufacturer (MSI).
 
M

Meat Plow

Jan 1, 1970
0
All of which are brands history has noted for premature failure.

There's only one brand of HDD I learned to trust and that was Quantum.

Quantum was a good drive until Maxtor took the over I have a couple 4.7
gig Fireballs that are used in my Fostex D90 8 track digital audio
recorder.. I don't rely on hard drive quality, I rely on redundancy. I
have cloned drives sitting on the shelf for this desktop and my laptop. My
data is stored on a network storage server with two drives, one hidden.
The active drive backs up to the hidden every morning at 3 am.
 
M

Meat Plow

Jan 1, 1970
0
They aren't called "Deathstars" just to be cute.

Fujitsu was another deathstar. I've ordered Dell Poweredge servers with
hot swap RAID 5 in the past that were delivered with brand new bad Fujitsu
drives. I finally had to insist another brand when specking out new
servers.
 
S

Spehro Pefhany

Jan 1, 1970
0
Oddly cmd.exe and command.com behave slightly differently under xp, but they
both do the same thing.

There's a commands.exe (in c:\HP\BIN) on this Vista <spit> machine
that seems to be similar similar (if not identical) to cmd.exe.

Note that cmd.exe (and my commands.exe) allow you to use the up-arrow
key (or F3) to copy the previous command (as well as other things) so
it's a lot more pleasant to use than the stripped command.com.

Best regards,
Spehro Pefhany
 
M

Michael A. Terrell

Jan 1, 1970
0
Meat said:
Fujitsu was another deathstar. I've ordered Dell Poweredge servers with
hot swap RAID 5 in the past that were delivered with brand new bad Fujitsu
drives. I finally had to insist another brand when specking out new
servers.


Like other brands, they made some good drives, and some bad ones. If
they were all bad, they would have been out of the business in a hurry.
You can't name a HD brand that someone won't complain that they are all
crap. When i was building custom PCs I let people pick out whatever
they wanted. The price of each item covered the wholesale cost, labor to
install it, and profit. Amazingly, 99% of the time they would chose
whatever brand was the cheapest in the storage range they wanted.

I've never had a Fujitsu hard drive fail on me, and I've only seen a
few bad ones. I still have several good Fujitsu drives from computers I
retired, after years of nearly 4/7 operation.

Of course Fujitsu wasn't as widely used as some other brands.


--
Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I've got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida
 
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