I think you have a bad drive ......
Drives that are failing relocated bad sectors, then lie to you and tell
you that they are ok (which may be true, in general, if not too many
sectors have been relocated). Your test (which I'm not familiar with)
may have disabled defect relocation and tried to read the actual bad
sectors (whose failure could have been expected under these conditions).
That isn't really my main concern, rather I'm more concerned about the
abnormal noises coming BEFORE it got to the actually failed sectors.
The suggestion is that those are sectors that are failing, but that have
not yet failed.
I'm speculating here, but that's how I would interpret the likely
explanation for what's going on. And, after 8 years, it certainly
doesn't surprise me that an 8-year old 20GB drive is failing. I'd get a
new drive. And if there is anything im****tant on that drive, by all
means back it up.
Dave Hardenbrook wrote:
> I am testing an old 1999 HP Pavilion system with a 20 GB Maxtor hard
> drive. The hard rive is *extremely* sluggish, making lots of
> "clattering train tracks" (for lack of a better analogy) sounds during
> disk seeks, and takes about 10 minutes just to boot up Windows 98.
>
> I thought the drive might be on the verge of failing, so I ran a full
> S.M.A.R.T. test on it, which revealed no problems. Then I ran the real
> mode version of DiskScan, which discovered a bunch of bad clusters close
> together about halfway through the disk. What I thought was interesting
> is that before it came to those bad clusters, it was making its
> "clattering" sounds and scanning sluggishly, as when Windows is running,
> but on the other side of the group of bad clusters the drive became very
> quiet and scanned the remainder of the disk at a more normal rate.
>
> What does this mean? Does it point to some physical damage to the
> drive? Is the drive still usable or should it be discarded?
>
> Dave
>
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