Bad sectors - how do you fix them?

Z

Zeal

Registered
Started getting "graunching" noises from my FW external HD yesterday. Sounds like "graunch-graunch - space - graunch-graunch - larger space" repeating.
I rebooted in Classic and ran Norton Utilities (6.0.3). It took some time to check the media on the 40GB drive and got two-thirds of the way through it when it too seemed to spend forever doing the "graunch-graunch..." routine mentioned above. During this time I was able to do other tasks, although they were very slow - obviously a lot of system resources were going into the media check. I stopped this after about 10 minutes as the status bar just didn't appear to be progressing at all.
The HD has three partitions: 7.3GB; 7.3GB; 28GB - and it's the 28GB partition that is playing up.
I have no idea how to fix this, other than to reformat the partition, however that is not much of an option for me as I have no way, or no where, to save my files.
The current HD was replaced last year after it too did the same thing. I have no idea what the cause is - it sits static and isn't able to be knocked. I do have a couple of Cambridge Soundworks computer speakers nearby - would they have anything to do with it? What do I do? Is there any software that I should use to rectify the problem?

Regards, Zeal :confused:

PowerBook 400mHz Pismo | 383 MB ram | 6GB | DVD-CD-R | Ext FW HDD 40GB | 21inch monitor | OS X 10.1.4 | OS 9.2.2
 
Sounds like the arm hit the platter. Grinding noises are bad. Assuming you didn't hit it with your hammer or use it as an ashtray, you're probably still under warranty. You should call your hdd company and see if they'll send you a new one, or at least see if they have any advice.

As for the back up .. unless you can borrow another drive to backup and low level reformat, you're pretty well screwed. You might see if you can find a store with a liberal return policy, buy a new drive, do the backup / reformat or warranty service, then restore the data & return the new hard drive.

The speakers probably don't have anything to do with it. Generally, the magnetic fields produced by speakers have little effect on hard disks, and most computer speakers are magentically shielded, so they cause absolutely no problems. Certainly a name brand pair of speakers like yours are shielded .. you should be able to look in the specs to see if they are.


Good luck, losing a hard drive sucks.
 
I had this on my main HDD in my iBook. Norton told me that it was a physically damaged drive, but when I booted into single user mode or Firewire Target the only directory that I couldn't get into was the system directory. I suspected that I had screwed up the file system when the computer ran out of power (sleep mode uses a lot more power in OSX than OS9).

In the end I reformatted and it is fine again. I regularly run the fsck command now from single user mode just to make sure that my filesystem is OK.

It may be phyically damaged, but it may not - it may just be that a few critical sectors have been damaged and that is causing the grating noise as the arm gets confused.

R.
 
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