Dead SCSI Drive

LiamC

Storage Is My Life
Joined
Feb 7, 2002
Messages
2,016
Location
Canberra
My Maxtor Atlas II 15K SCSI drive finally bit the dust (I think). Yesterday, I got a lot of write errors while running. When I attempted to reboot, I got a BSOD Stop Error 0x00000024.

Nothing seems to fix this. This happens attempting to boot Windows XP in normal and safe mode. If you insert an XP boot disk and attempt to repair using the recovery console, as soon as Windows attempts to access the drive, BSOD.

Tried a different (known good) cable. Same.
Tried a different SCSI controller. Same.
Different power supply. Same.
Tried as a slave drive in another Windows box. Same. As soon as the Windows tries to access the drive, BSOD.

Should I bother trying to resurrect the drive just to clone the OS? Or just junk it?

Adaptecs SCSI utilities identify 3 bad sectors on the drive and attempts to move them, but after doing that and rebooting, the next pass over the drive identifies the same bad sectors.
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
Joined
Jan 17, 2002
Messages
21,564
Location
I am omnipresent
SCSI drives have all kinds of internal error control going on. If those bad sectors aren't moving there probably aren't any reserve sectors left to re-map.

It's a shame but she's probably toast.
 

LiamC

Storage Is My Life
Joined
Feb 7, 2002
Messages
2,016
Location
Canberra
I think I bought it circa 2003 or so, and it's been running 24/7 just about ever since. And it's still noticeably quicker in a lot of things than today's SATA best.

The good news is that I used a tool on the UBCD 5.03 CD called VIVARD. It's 0.4 but it worked. It found the dud sectors and remapped them, even though it was an unrecognized SCSI drive. Once that was done, Windows booted.

For those in the UBCD know, your probably going to ask why I didn't just uses SCSIMax () as it's on the UBCD --well they seem to have issues getting the pathing correct. I either had ASPI drivers load, but no SCSIMax available, or SCSIMax available, but ASPI drivers wouldn't load.:frusty:

I'm going to copy the boot partition to an image, but I'm going to leave this running to see how long it lasts.

Atlas II lives! :rabbit:

Sorry for being a bit sporadic with replying, work is just a tad hectic...
 

LunarMist

I can't believe I'm a Fixture
Joined
Feb 1, 2003
Messages
16,625
Location
USA
I still have an 18GB X15.3 from about that era. It was working fine about 3 years ago when decommissioned.
 

LiamC

Storage Is My Life
Joined
Feb 7, 2002
Messages
2,016
Location
Canberra
Thread necro.

I had the need to use ViVard again over the weekend. A computer wasn't backed up and the disk had developed a couple of bad sectors. Macrium couldn't clone or image the drive as the bad sectors caused a read disk failure. Telling Macrium to ignore file system errors didn't help. Chkdsk for some reason couldn't deal with the bad sectors and neither could Seagate/Samsung's tools. ViVard moved dealt with reallocating the sector, allowing Macrium to image the drive. Restored the image to another drive and people are grateful :)

One of the MFT's was corrupt as well. A util called TestDisk helped there.
 
Top