Vulcan HD going haywire

[mcafee@umich.edu]

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.

Everything seemed to work fine, but I got similar errors earlier this year
(about a year after the original breakdown).  The first crash had impressed
upon me the importance of regularly saving important stuff to floppy, so I
didn't suffer any grievous losses.  I even figured that I could live with
one crash per year, considering the cost of getting a new HD.  However, the
drive suffered another crash only a few weeks later.

Hoping it was a fluke, I reformatted and reinstalled.  It crashed again in
a matter of *days*.

I theorized that the disk had some bad blocks that somehow weren't being
found by ProSel or the Finder.  I used AE's Partition Manager to make
a new partition out of a chunk of the old first one (the one in which the
errors always seemed to crop up), deactivated it, reformatted, and
reinstalled.  Crash.  I shuffled around the location of the unused
partition in the space that had been occupied by the old buggy partition.
Crash.  Crash.  Each crash might take anywhere from minutes to weeks to
occur, but they always did.  The longest crash-free session ended this
morning after weeks of good behavior, and I've finally had enough.

Has anyone else had problems with a hard drive (Vulcan or otherwise) like
this?

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.

This morning, my GNO directory simply vanished (in addition to the
partition it was on renaming itself with an 'e', as described above).
I eventually found that the lost directory appeared when I used ProSel's
"Sort Directory" function, but no other disk function would admit that it
existed, not even "Exhume File".  I even tried deleted the GNO directory
from the "Sort Directory" command, hoping Exhume would then be able to
find it, but it couldn't.  So I'm screwed.

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.

--
Sean McAfee   --   mcafee@umich.edu   --   Conky 2000 Ready To Assist You!