Dying hard drive issues

I have TI scheduled to take a FULL image to a drive across the LAN every Monday, then Tue-Fri it does an INCremental.

Lately all the incrementals have been failing telling me the image archive is corrupt yet the FULL image on a Monday always completes without a fuss.

I've since found out it's only when you try and verify this image you find it is corrupt. So basically I've lost a couple of weeks worth of images, all are now corrupt.

I ran the Maxtor Powermax util on my Maxtor drive, it passed the 90sec quick test, ran the FULL advanced test and it failed, not a total failure (i.e. return to Maxtor) - it offered to repair it. I chose NO for now.

Decided if it is any way dodgy just to replace with a NEW drive. So... took a FULL image across to my external firewire drive, installed nice shiny new Maxtor (same size 80gb), booted from CD, started restoring to the new drive and it fails halfway through telling me archive is corrupt.

My solution was to connect the old dying drive as slave and tell TI to Clone this old drive to the new drive.... this works and my machine is up and running okay, this new drive passes the Maxtor Powermax advanced test so it appears healthy yet I am still getting WindowsXP freeze/lockup randomly.

Would I be correct in guessing that maybe parts of the OS are corrupted due to the previous dying drive and simply cloning everything across to this new drive doesn't help much

I may just try a Windows XP Repair over the top to see if it cures the stability.

If not a complete re-install is probably about due!

Any thoughts/advice anyone please?

Thanks, Fedorov.

 

Hi Federov,

Bad or poorly performing RAM is often the cause of Windows instability or corrupt images. Therefore, as a starter, I would download and run either the floppy disk or CD version of <Memtest 86+>. Run the test for a few hours and ensure there are zero errors reported. That will check whether your RAM has gone flaky, whether you're using too aggressive memory timing or perhaps it just needs reseating.

Regards

 

Hello Fedorov999,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

In addition to Menorcaman's advice I would recommend that you run the command:

chkdsk [drive letter]: /r

for all your drive letters to make sure the file system has no errors.

Thank you.
--
Ilya Toytman

 

Thanks all, I'm off on 2 weeks vacation so I'll have a fiddle when I get back

Jbmoar, believe it or not this PC is a true testament to how good MS Windows really is, it has survived upgrades from an original Win3.1, then to Win95, 98, 2000 and now XP, it has had 3 motherboards/rebuilds in that time also and still runs surprisingly good and NEVER needed a reinstall!!!

Probably about due one after 10 years don't you think?

Fedorov.