Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2005/07/20
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Quoth the Brian Reid <reid@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us>: > One conclusion is obvious: stop buying Maxtor drives. Another > conclusion is that there might be something wrong with your electric > power, humidity, dust, or temperature. Disks like the same kind of > climate that you do. > > It is not plausible that an external hard drive will "show up" but > have no files on it. I'd take those disks to a responsible computer > store and ask them to have a look-see. This is not a job for amateurs > computer people. Actually, I've had this happen several times, so it's QUITE plausible to me. It's generally turned out to be a problem with the drive cable or connections, though in a Houston summer it does sometimes seem to be a temperature issue. The fact that it's nailing many drives at once here suggests to me either an environmental problem of some sort or quite possibly, again, a cable or socket problem. When I have HD troubles, before I do ANYTHING I let the system cool all the way down and reseat ALL the internal cabling. 90% of the time that fixes it, and on several occasions it's saved me from turning a hiccup into a total and complete disster. (Yes, I have dust issues. It's a cheap apartment, not well insulated, and the computer desk sits in front of a brick veneer... dust? You might say.) I keeping spare drive cables and canned air on hand, so when I get wierd results I usually unplug all the drive connections, blow them out well, sometimes switch to another cable, reconnect everything, making sure it's all seated well, and then wait for everything to cool down. Usually the problem will cure itself. (It's worth noting that in my case this includes dismantling the external cases and checking THAT drive connection, too.) I had a drive last week show a bad media descriptor and mismatched FATs, and all KINDS of files lost or corrupted... something like 1800 lost filenames and a lost cluster count of some obscene number with WAY too many digits. I killed Norton before it could rewrite anything, shut down, switched cables, killed half a can of air, reassembled, waited an hour, and... all fine. I had to reinstall Star Office from retrospect because a couple of .dll's were crosslinked. The HD -- perfect. (A Maxtor, BTW. I run Seagates for preference, Maxtors if I must, and nothing else. WD warranty service is first rate, as I have occasion to know. I've had to USE it way too many times. Now I just buy someone else's drive.)