A bit long...and please let me know if I should not be posting this here, but I am looing for some ideas and figured you guys might be able to off some thoughts/suggestions. I have hit a wall in trying to resolve this issue!

My issue: Out of 250 Windows 2000 workstations (same exact hardward - Maxtor Diamonmax Plus I am supporting, we have had roughly 25-30 HD (crashes) per say?

Details:
1) A few have been the N40P issue, I cannot access the data and have to send them out to be recovered....a big thanks to people such as yourself! Looks to be something that just happens with the firmware and cannot be prevented.

2) For the majority of the issues I see, these drives will show two symptoms (neither will boot): the first is a system file will be lost causing the machine to not boot for the user, second is the machine will not boot and when I look at the drives with some data recovery software the partitions show but the file system is lost. I can specify the file system and then recover data. It will also show lost directories. In this case when I use something like Norton Disk Dr. it says the NTLDR is missing.

As you can tell, my knowledge is definitley not up to par on this sort of issue...thus me asking for you thoughts or ideas on if this could be the Maxtor drives causing my issues or if I should be looking elsewhere. Please let me know (or delete this topic) if you find it should not be posted in these forums.

-Or ,we did have had a third party company look at the drives.
They said that two things can be done to avoid these kinds of errors
1)Make sure the hard disk is kept cool.
2)Disable “write behind cache” This will decrease overall performance by 2%, but data is always committed to disk right away.

Thoughts?

A big thanks,
John

Out of curiosity was this in response to my post or another? I don't have any issues with the drives making any noises, and the ones that have my main issue can be formatted and used again with no issue. Maybe I am confused about your post....

Hi,

Theese drives produce a lot of heat and when they heat up they begin writing incorrectly, that's why they grow bad sectors, and when writing bads to the SA they cannot initialize anymore ->N40P.
So a solution can be cooling the drives directly.

pepe

Something doesn't sound right -

I am not an expert at hard drive repair... But if it were a drive issue in that the series is a lemon then you would think that other people would be experiencing it and it would be common knowledge as to what the problem is.

I think you need to look at outside factors - Start in with what Pepe suggested and take a look at the enviroment you are running the drives in.

I don't know what your cases look like - But you might be able to pull this off quick and dirty. My machine overheated constantly. My Hard drives and floppy sat in the same metal housing below the cd roms. it is pretty common.
I got rid of my floppy and left the faceplate off - I moved the hard drives back, and then put a case fan in new gap blowing directly on the hard drive.

Hope it helps-
Snuggie.

I would agree....I don't think it is a drive issue as we have a few hundred other workstations running the same hardware without these issues. Most or all of those machines have Windows 98.....it seems to be the W2K machines that are showing all of these issues. I think the ventalation sucks in the design of the machines....but the 98 one don't crash nearly as much (if at all) as the Windows 2000, and we have many more 98 vs W2k machines. Almost seems by what I am saying I could rule out heat being a factor and look towards the W2K OS....I stumped. I have seen a few XP ones crash also.....most when I use drive recovery software do not have file systems....and have lsot files once I specify the file system.

I am going to start to disable the "write cache enabled" option in the hope that possibly it is something to do with the data not being totally unloaded before all power is shut down.

Can a heat damaged drive be tested in any way to see if heat was a factor? Or should I try to measure the running temp of the drives somehow?

Any other ideas are welcome...

Hello, Sirdoobs,

You can check the ones that are detected correctly by BIOS for bad sectors and you will see by the position of theese that they grow at the worst places like FAT table or MFT table and LOG files, and in the files that were written right before the crash. I can tell you after a few dozens of the 6E series that the most frequent cause of the fault is overheating. The OS will not produce bad sectors by itself nor make the HDD undetectable for BIOS.
It is another question if you have only file system problems and damages (and besides the surface is intact). This can be caused by other hardware (memory, overclocking, lack of CPU cooling, IDE controller, cable,...) error. You can check if the drives under W2k and XP run in UDMA6 mode, maybe it is better to run them in UDMA 5 (100MHz). I experienced problems with Silicon image RAID controller card running at UDMA6, but no data loss, only the XP complained about not being able to write some data (but in fact it was written correctly).

regards,
pepe

These are 6E drives, but my main thought now are why are the Windows 98 machines not seeing these crashes.....but the Windows 2000 are? Seems almost like I could rule out heat...unless that W2K runs the drives harder thus prducing more heat? The majority of the drives I have looked at can be reused with no issues....no errors found on them as far as I am aware.

Almost seems to possibly point to the HD write cache being enabled in W2K....wonder if that could cause this large of issue. All hardware is the same between the W2K and Win98 machines...again the 98 machines are not seeing these failures.

BTW...Thanks for the responses!

Hello, Sirdoobs,

I think you have to add more RAM in the W2K machine to reduce the HD operation in swapping memory. The W98 machine maybe have enough RAM, so it's not so often swapping memory to HD. In a overheated sistem, other the ventilating, change the PSU to large watts, the HD (and system) heat will be lower the before (this i found by my experience in a comp. shop).

BTW, sorry of my poor english.

_________________
Best Regards,
e-win

something with sense

I also think that your problem is not hdd overheating...

You can rule out heat from your problem by using a drive that failed and put it to a stress test under heat conditions and see if it fails

The problem may be from other parts of your systems...

By example win98, by default, doesn't enable dma transfers but win2k does !

I recommend that you use memtest to see if the memory on your systems is working fine... check that your processors do not overheat (>50 celsius)

To John, if you did not see enough explanation or if this explanation did not convince you, I think that the best thing to do ( better then see people trying to expose theyers hipoteses ) is to look for some company that has the proper knowledge and ask them why you had the problem and how is possible to prevent this problem in the future.
I can garantee you that a company any company will help you for free. Also I think that the company that did the data recovery for you is able to give you a report that can help you to undertand what could happened with your disk and what they think that you can do to prevent the situation in future.
At least we do this inour lab. Not only to our clients but to all companies that had this problem or that want to prevent this problem. Please guys pay atention - to all companies -
Jose Pinto
HDDLAB

_ a little message to people that wrote me ofenses in some messages including doing alusions that I have afraid of others repair companies.
We can explain exactily what happens with Maxtors Disks - how companies can do prevention - because we are afraid that this could happen : They are gonna look help in places that they will not be able to find a proper assistence.

Thanks again for the info here. I may end up doign what you recommend as far as having another company that specializes ni this take a look and see what they think. We had one third party company look at some of our drives and they said we could do 2 things to help resolve this...here was what they said:

Answer received by the third party company.
They said that two things can be done to avoid these kinds of errors

Make sure the hard disk is kept cool.
Disable “write behind cache” This will decrease overall performance by 2 %, but data is always committed to disk right away.

I don't know if they gave us more details......this was one of our facililties in Denmard that was working on the drives.....not myself in the U.S.

Anways....thanks again! My search will continue!!!

Hi,

I have a Maxtor 6e040l0 with N40P problem, i do have some firmware on hard, but seems can't flash to the drive. Do I need to do any jumper setting or what?

Thanks & have a nice day.