However, I think modern hard drives are much less shit than the deathstars were.
The Deathstars were pretty much just a shitty drive as far as reliability is concerned. They were all doomed from the start because IBM failed at designing and manufacturing it. I really don't think any external factors had much to do with it.
Google released a study on what they've found with regards to disk failures, which can give you some info on what can cause drives to fail.
The analogy
"As an analogy, a magnetic head slider flying over a disk surface with a flying height of 25 nm with a relative speed of 20 meters/second is equivalent to an aircraft flying at a physical spacing of 0.2 µm at 900 kilometers/hour. This is what a disk drive experiences during its operation."
And I can't remember the source (but I confirmed this myself with some piece of SMART software once), but due to the modern HDD's roughly have 100-330 errors in read data per second.... CRC takes care of them however and so they are invisible to us.
Try different cables, and try the drive in another computer. After the third drive, I'd suspect that it isn't the problem. Having 3 dead drives is highly unlikely, so make sure everything else is working.
Also, make sure your SATA controller is in the right mode for Windows to see it.
Google says grub 21 is probably you plugging a hdd into a raid controller port, even if you've not got it raided. Apparently your raid controller and bios are both trying to write to the same place on the disk, the winstall is affecting the raid controller and vice versa.
If youy've got a chingrish manual, google your mobo manufacturer, look up your board on their site, get newest bios version available. Follow instructions supplied with bios update. It'll probably work.
HereComesPete wrote:Google says grub 21 is probably you plugging a hdd into a raid controller port, even if you've not got it raided. Apparently your raid controller and bios are both trying to write to the same place on the disk, the winstall is affecting the raid controller and vice versa.
If youy've got a chingrish manual, google your mobo manufacturer, look up your board on their site, get newest bios version available. Follow instructions supplied with bios update. It'll probably work.
In this case, I'd definitely make sure your SATA controller is not in and RAID mode.
this is what i am leaning towards, although its probably unnecessary really.
main problem is i can't REALLY afford it, which isn't to say that i would be unable to come up with the funds, but i really shouldn't
also, knowing my luck at least ONE of the new components would be faulty, even considered a dell, at least it wil be tested. i know some people don't like em but i haven't had trouble with them. could get one of the prebuilds from ocuk though
HereComesPete wrote:
If youy've got a chingrish manual, google your mobo manufacturer, look up your board on their site, get newest bios version available. Follow instructions supplied with bios update. It'll probably work.
according to the asus site i need to rrun aflash utility fro ma floppy, but my flppydrive doesn't work
i think i'm just going to say fuck it all and get a new rig
With what's happened, my recommendation would be to send the drive back and get your money back before they start blaming you for breaking them. (I don't think you've broken them, just that they don't know how to properly diagnose misformatted/whatever disks with professional low-level tools)
Maybe there's some fixable weirdness in the BIOS, but if resetting to BIOS defaults doesn't cure it, it's a minefield but with clustershit bombs.
Grab a USB external drive in the interim for teh storing of the datas and the pr0ns (not games or apps) which will be very easily transferrable to any new box you might subsequently decide to buy or build.
Vids play fine over USB, and it's removable storage which means it's ace for backups and transferring stuff.
this third one is from ocuk whereas the others were ebuyer, so this wil be the first one i've sent back there
i have a usb hard drive, but i tried installing ubuntu on it so i didn't have to put all my settigns and what not in every time i booted the live cd but it didn't seem to like it for some reason
i'll send the drive back today.
i think i might order parts for a new rig today, as that way i can get them this week while i'm off work, rather than next week when i'm on nights and won't have much time to put it together, although i don't know if i have access to enough monay at the moment :S
I might be missing something here, but three hard drives all having the same fault sounds like it's probably not the hard drive. Surely it's cheaper to find your problem and replace the unserviceable part than to buy a whole new PC? Unless you've got an ancient thing that could probably do with a full upgrade anyway, or aren't confident enough to go fiddling in the gizzards of it. A mobo/CPU/ram upgrade is cheaper than a full machine and is pretty much a full upgrade.
Dog Pants wrote:I might be missing something here, but three hard drives all having the same fault sounds like it's probably not the hard drive. Surely it's cheaper to find your problem and replace the unserviceable part than to buy a whole new PC? Unless you've got an ancient thing that could probably do with a full upgrade anyway, or aren't confident enough to go fiddling in the gizzards of it. A mobo/CPU/ram upgrade is cheaper than a full machine and is pretty much a full upgrade.
We're pretty much of the decision the mobo is faulty, there's not alot else that'll eat HDD's like that.
Unless you know, happen to run an industrial electromagnet next to your pc.
Dog Pants wrote:I might be missing something here, but three hard drives all having the same fault sounds like it's probably not the hard drive. Surely it's cheaper to find your problem and replace the unserviceable part than to buy a whole new PC? Unless you've got an ancient thing that could probably do with a full upgrade anyway, or aren't confident enough to go fiddling in the gizzards of it. A mobo/CPU/ram upgrade is cheaper than a full machine and is pretty much a full upgrade.
it isnt' THAT ancient, only about 2.5 years, trouble is it's an AGP board, so new mobo means i will HAVE to get a new gfx card, so i might as well go the whole hog
Ah right, makes sense. Even so, upgrading is still cheaper than a complete replacement. Your old HDDs, case, possibly PSU, optical drives, monitor, mouse and keyboard are probably fine for a while yet and will save you a few hundred quid by not replacing them in toto. You just don't get teh glee of a new machine.
Incidentally, mine is the third complete iteration of my original 1998 PC.
Dog Pants wrote:Ah right, makes sense. Even so, upgrading is still cheaper than a complete replacement. Your old HDDs, case, possibly PSU, optical drives, monitor, mouse and keyboard are probably fine for a while yet and will save you a few hundred quid by not replacing them in toto. You just don't get teh glee of a new machine.
Incidentally, mine is the third complete iteration of my original 1998 PC.
yea obviously i will keep mouse and keyboard (just recently got an MX revolution mouse, mm shiny), dvd writer is fine too. will keep my 500gb media drive but will need a new primary drive as thats corrupt, which is why i have been trying to replace it. monitor too is fine.
as for the psu i rather suspect it will be a little under powered to cope with what i will put in the new monster
