MARTIN ATKINS wrote to JAMES BRADLEY, "Win9E Harddrivicide? REV"

 JB> You'll never guess, but I formated my C: partition this morning, was
 JB> shoving W98FE into it, and when it went to the reboot... NO FRIGGIN'
 JB> DRIVE!

 MA> Sounds like it is most certainly hardware. :(

Ya, I got it. I had the surrogate drive on as master. When that went out to
lunch, and didn't come back, I just BIOSed it to NONE, and kept on. When a
reboot scanned the buss, this dead drive must have diverted the good one from
view. Moved the slave back to the single master, and that did it. Result: One
scrambled FAT32, and one dead in the water Maxtor.

I think I went on a bit with JH, so I'll try to keep it short here.
 JB> The same seemed to have happen to my master on the same bus, so

 MA> C: _is_ or should be master. I hope that's just a typo and you
 MA> haven't got the master position on the ribbon jumped slave. =:)

See above. Wouldn't know how to wire a cable select. /-:
 JB> I'm suspecting: A) Controller is being funky. (Possible.)

 MA> It could also be a flaky connection to the mother board.

On the same channel of the same MB, Drive #:
1. (Auction scrap) Bad blocks all over. Shelved it.
2. (New) Just stops about three or four times. 
   A) Re-plug data cable first two times.
   B) Scrambles FAT. Crimp the DC plug.
   C) Cross fingers/Hold breath.
3. (Second hand/Cast off) 
   Decided to pick this time to die just to confuse me. 

#1 burned out shortly after purchase, so with its lineage, I just fired into
the "Look at later" pile. #2 seems to have been tolerating this
intermittent
power thing for some time. I thought it was just Windows doing its Windows
kinda thing, so I just rebooted all the time. #3 came from a brain-injured
(Really!) person, and was then adopted by a first time computer/I-Net user. I
did fdisk it as soon as it arrived here, but with this convoluted trouble on
the same IDE bus, ones imagination tends to run a little wild.

 JB> B) MBR getting messed up. (I guess so.)
 MA> an educated guess.

I guess it could have migrated a WORM to a partition on another drive before I
fdisked it. <-;

 JB> C) W98 is releasing a time bomb. (Even I don't think so.)
 MA> corrupt medium.

The fog of war...

 JB> D) A Trojan got through two years ago.
 MA> before things went pear shaped.

I was a constant 175, size 32" waist since HS. What else you need to know? 

 MA> remove all disks off the IDE 0 ribbon and put your master disk

Just for the record, isn't IDE channel one master labelled 0, slave 1, channel
two master 2, then 3? Anyway, hda was dead and BIOSed to NONE, hdb was getting
stuck w/W'98 after the FAT scramble when it was hda.

 MA> figure out what's going on.

It all started when I moved to the big city. You see, I spent my first four
years... 

 JB> Arrr!!! Film at eleven.

 MA>  Watch the film and get a good nights sleep. It often

LOL! Wayne C and I both have pain issues. When I get bouts, I tend to go real
dim, and almost cut an appendage off. Well, I had *just* placed two library
books with Linux DVDs in front of the machine, when it scrambled its FAT
partition, then the surrogate goes dead, then... I thought I had bitched once
too often about MS and the Windows brainwashing cameras had moved in. <-; 

As Waynes' crisis had just passed, I almost wee'ed myself when the same net
result showed up here! 
 
 MA> helps to put things down and walk away. Clear the head and go
 MA> back to the problem when you feel refreshed. I tired and
 MA> irritable person is not the best one to solve a problem.

That's when I spout off to you guys! 

 MA> L8r. :)

Thanks for listening to a mad-man! Rodger Ramjet. Over and OUT!


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