hard drives

[kris]

Can a timeout error be repaired on a hard drive? Tnx.

[Maximiliam]

Can you please describe the problem more in lenght and how your general computer setup looks like. The answer is that there are ways, yes.

[kris]

I have a GX-260 tower with 20G hard drive, an IBM-Deskstar IDE. I tried to ghost it and it would not ghost. So I tried to format the hard drive and I am getting errors. I have tried to format it 3 different times and receive a timeout error. The error has shown up on head 3, 9 and 12.
So it appears that each time it is formatting a little more of the drive. I have replaced several hard drives with different errors so now I am wondering what I can do to fix some of these errors and not replace the drives.

[ronallandottk]

Well, first of all, if a drive is really getting flaky, and generating a lot of errors, I would be a bit wary in still using it, because anytime it could give out and I could lose all my data.

If you want to try and correct the error, I'd recommend you try a low-level format. Formatting via an OS is a high-level format, you need a utility to perform a low level format. It's possible your computer has a low-level format utility in its BIOS. If not, try here:

http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm

Low-level formatting virtually "zeroes" out all the sectors, rendering it completely blank. After low-level formatting, you have to high-level format it with the proper file system depending on your operating system (FAT, NTFS, EXT, etc.)

If this succeeds, the error may have been corrected. If it still occurs, the problem may not be with the media itself, but with the drive electronics instead. In this case it would be more convenient to buy a new or second hand drive.

[kris]

Sorry that I have gotten busy.. I understand and agree with what you are saying. I would guess that it is best to replace it as I am doing a low-level and it is generating errors.
Thanks so much for your advice.

[ronallandottk]

No problem, glad to be of help. Just to add to the discussion, it just entered my mind that if some sectors of the drive are bad, a low-level followed by a high-level format should result in the drive still being usable, albeit, some sectors would be marked as bad and thus some space would be lost. Timeout errors are a bit of a rarity on windows based systems (unless the error is truly hardware based), though they seem to have fairly often on Linux based systems particularly when it comes to individual distribution's implementation of DMA (direct memory access).

There are some workarounds if you use Linux. On Windows, if the drive is bad, then it's bad...usually. Try turning off DMA at the BIOS and use PIO mode instead. The thing is, if you really want it to work, it may probably still will...reliability of course, is another issue altogether.