Harddisk blues and questions about solutions...

[Michael Robinson]

On Sunday 30 March 2003 04:26 pm, you wrote:
> If I understand the problem properly, it seems like there ought not be
> any problem just using a new drive on the old controller.  For example,
> I am dual booting XP and RH8.0 on a 120 GB Hitachi (IBM) 8MB cache
> Deskstar (ie, pretty modern) which supports ATA133.  My computer has
> ATA66 controllers.  No problems at all.  The only loss is the burst
> speed, but since I don't use much that would create a sufficiently
> sustained read/write op, I don't ever see that anyway.  You might just
> try a new drive in your system and see what happens.  Since your old
> drive was 10GB (point is, over 8.4) and you have no complaints about it
> besides its imminent death (which is, I admit, a substantial downside)
> I'm guessing you should have no troubles with a new drive.
>
> As for repairing the old one, the only things I have heard were entirely
> anecdotal, but they said that the repair was substantially more
> expensive than the replacement of the drive.  Typically, most recovery
> centers would remove the platters, extract the data and place it on
> stable media, rather than try to fix the old drive.
>
> Andrew
>
>

Oh, I tried plugging a new drive in that I could pick up locally.
Normally that works, at least on an ATA-66 board.  It locked
my VA503+ motherboard up though.  I don't know if there is
another bios upgrade.  I've had trouble with newer drives
not working on low density 40 wire cables on newer boards.
Thanks anyways :-)