Heatwave killed my PC

[Alan]

Oh boy!

Over the last two weeks I've had nothing but hassle with my dinosaur PC.

First the POST test stated I had "lost" a quarter of my RAM! I had 512MB split between two 256mb sticks......Ironically the Crucial stick has lost half of itself (WTF???), and the crappy Maxtor memory is ok. :-\

I managed to bag a nice 512mb of Crucial for only £26 of Ebay.......sorted!


Now my harddrive is dying! (I think)

Yesterday it reached a scary 40oC and then started going nuts..... My PC hangs but the drive light stays on (anybody?). It's an 80GB Maxtor and apparently they get hot! (what if I lived in a hot country hur?......I'd be screwed!). The harddrive is only a few months old to.

This morning when I booted up the screen was full of mad characters in DOS ........a bit like the matrix (you'd think that was the graphics card.....but I'm not so sure)

Got the side open as I type this with a huge 20 inch indoor fan blowing on it and that has only got the HDD temperature down to 30oC. My MB temperature is 33oC, which is so weird because my CPU in idle mode is only 45oC.

Sometimes when I boot up it complains about there being no bootable disk in the PC, which makes me think it could be the HDD again. I have done lots of tests on it......but HDD tests only tend to check the surface of it, and not whether its working or not.

Apart form buying more fans and another harddrive :-\.......what can I do?

[Alan]

I am now writing this post using a Pentium II 380hz PC, 64MB of ram, a 6 gig harddrive and windows 98!!!

Haven't even tried RND on it yet :-\ I think my PDA is more powerful!

[Jannik]

mad characters in DOS

sound a little bit like a virus ... perhaps in the Master Boot Record.

Can't you swap the hard drives to check, whether it works in the PII 380?
If it's defective, you should get a RMA and a replacement by Maxtor.
I wouldn't say that 40°C are too hot for a hdd ...

On the other hand you could try the small hdd with the other mainboard, to check if there's a problem with the mainboard/BIOS and if the mad DOS characters appear again ...

Good luck!

[Alan]

>sound a little bit like a virus

I have backups of the MBR which I already restored. I also use Ghost a lot so it can't be a virus.
I have my HDD partitioned into 3:- Windows,Apps and data. It only takes two minutes to restore the windows and apps partitions! This means I can install lots of junk, test drivers, catch viruses and restore the system back to two years ago (It's also faster than defraging).

Good idea about swapping them around,it just never occurred to me! I couldn't put the Maxtor in the PII box since it has XP on it (need more than 64MB ram), but I did try the Win98 HDD in my main PC and it seemed ok........so it looks like its the Maxtor that's failing!

>If it's defective, you should get a RMA and a replacement by Maxtor.

Ahhhh.... it was second hand, so I dont think I can do that

Amazingly enough I tried RND on the PII and it ran as good as my AMD1.6! (it loaded much slower though)

[Zomis]

It's an 80GB Maxtor and apparently they get hot!

Yes indeed. I and my brother has the same experience. I don't trust Maxtor much. I recommend Seagate discs. Try to save as much information as you can and then find another facturer

[Jannik]

I couldn't put the Maxtor in the PII box since it has XP on it (need more than 64MB ram)

You could use it just for the first 3 seconds, before the OS loads ... just to see if the DOS characters appear and then immediately switch the PC off ...

>If it's defective, you should get a RMA and a replacement by Maxtor.

Ahhhh.... it was second hand, so I dont think I can do that

I wouldn't say that. I think it depends on the serial number and the manufacture date ... you can check the warranty online ...

[Holger]

> It's an 80GB Maxtor and apparently they get hot!

Indeed they do! :-o

Guess what type the hard drive was that failed for me a few weeks ago with bad sectors, causing loss of some valuable data and the need to search for many different, old backups to restore most of the R'n'D development data (yes, the backup thing was my fault, of course) -- it was a 80 GB Maxtor drive! :-o

Unfortunately, I was a Maxtor fan before I finally realized that they *really* get too hot! (I had a big disaster of losing all my MP3s just ripped from my many CDs some years ago when I tried to backup them to another (Maxtor) drive of the same size -- everything got too hot, and the next day both drives had totally corrupted file systems. I added an extra fan to that PC case and had no problems since then with that PC.)

My current PC has four internal disk drives (with enough space and cooling for six drives, so there's currently more than enough room for ventilation), and all four drives reach temperatures of between 40°C and 50°C (with current summer weather -- usually it's between 35°C and 45°C). All four drives are relatively new Maxtor drives (all around one year old).

Although it's already quite hot, you should be more or less OK if the drive's temperature stays under 50°C. The cooler the better, though. (I already managed to get one of these drives somewhere between 75°C and 80°C, which is *way* to hot, and the drive indeed stopped operation then. After cooling down, everything was fine again, but I don't trust this drive anymore since then. It won't be possible to give that drive back to Maxtor, btw, as they can check with simple S.M.A.R.T. tools that it was operated outside it's specifications.)

So I cannot recommend Maxtor anymore, which I trusted for a long time.

Recently I tested a Hitachi drive (it I remember correctly), which did stay cool during all tests, regardless of how much traffic I generated on it.

If anybody else has recommendations for "cool" drives, please let me know, as I want to swap a few of my drives for cooler ones (and put the hot ones into external, cool cases for not running all day and night, like they do in my workstation PC which I never power down).

> mad characters in DOS

BTW: I don't think it's a virus -- this could well be a temperature problem, too. Try to check what Jannik suggested, and also try to mount it not as the boot disk, but simply as a data disk to check it for temperature with SMART tools in both PCs to compare the operation temperatures.

[Alan]

it was a 80 GB Maxtor drive!

that doesn't surprise me!

(I already managed to get one of these drives somewhere between 75°C and 80°C

Wow that's amazing!.......isn't the boiling point of water 100oC? (you could of used the hdd to make coffee)

Anyway it was cooler today (and last night) and it seemed to boot up ok...... I did a bit of 3D rendering (a PC killing activity) and it seemed ok, but as you say "i don't trust it", and neither do I anymore. I think I'll go for an IBM.