Re: Vulcan HD going haywire

[goldbug@oanet.com@oanet.com (Herbert Fung)]

In <199604211956.PAA28998@verne.ifs.umich.edu>, mcafee@umich.edu writes:
>Early last year I purchased a used 40 MB Vulcan hard drive.  After a few
>months, I began to get some odd disk errors.  Neither ProSel 16 nor the
>Finder could find any bad blocks (or any other problems) on either
>partition, so I reinstalled everything and hoped for the best.
>
>Here are some more of the symptoms:
>
>I've been using the default partition names (/ae1, /ae2, etc.).  One
>immediate symptom of a crash is that one of the partitions will rename
>itself so that its first letter is an 'e' (/ee1, /ee2, etc.).
>
>The damage will start out confined to a single directory, but spreads as I
>get system messages like "Disk AE1 appears to be damaged.  Please move data
>to another disk."  Since I spend the great majority of my time in my GNO
>directory, that always seems to be the one affected.

Is it also changing filenames indiscriminately? Or do you notice any audiable
changes in the drive's spin-up? If it was the former, according to my experience
the controller card is on the fritz. If it's the latter, the drive maybe suffering
from either drive sticktion or power problems.

For me, I've replace the drive in my Vulcan with a SCSI card and got a custom
cable made to connect it to my RamFAST card. Not the easiest answers, but I
wanted an internal drive.

>If (as I suspect) my HD is trashed on too deep a level to be repairable
>(at least by me), does anyone have any suggestions for the best and/or
>cheapest GS-compatible hard drive obtainable these days?
>
>Thanks much in advance for any help.