Misdiagnosis

It's egg on face time. I've posted a few times about my hard disk woes. Here[^] and here[^] and here[^].

I have to admit that it seemed like I was seeing an unnaturally high failure rate which I at first ascribed to the fact that we never switch our computers off (I run seti@home)[^]. But my wife's computer is also never switched off and she has the same hard drive we bought nearly 3 years ago. The kids computer runs 24/7 and it also has a hard drive that's almost 3 years old. So to believe that I could lose 4 drives in less than a year was stretching my credulity.

My credulity was stretched to breaking point when I got home tonight. My computer had blue screened but, since it had blue screened some hours previously, the monitor energy saving had kicked in and the screen was blank. Windows XP, when blue screened, isn't watching mouse or keyboard activity so there's no way to bring the monitor back on line. Indeed, when I first saw that blank screen that refused to spring back to life I assumed someone had switched the monitor off; switching it back on didn't work. Then I noticed that the hard disk activity light was full on.

Ok, switch the monitor back on and hit reset. And up comes the BIOS with all the correct details; two processors, the right amount of memory and so on. Followed by the dreaded message to the effect that the system volume is dead. Say what???

So I do another reset and go into BIOS setup. No hard disk!

Given that this is a 4 or 5 day old hard disk (from my perspective) this seemed somewhat hard to believe. So I ponder my options. BIOS is reporting the right CPU count, right memory size etc. The motherboard is probably ok but what about the IDE controller on the motherboard? BIOS still shows my DVD writer so I swap the DVD and hard disk channels. Can still see the DVD writer but not the disk. That seems to eliminate the IDE controllers. I don't have many options left short of swapping the motherboard. But I do have another power supply. So I swapped that and suddenly the new drive is working again.

And then the penny drops. I changed computer cases back in December of last year, before the very first hard disk failed and, due to laziness, I used the power supply that came with that case. The new power supply connectors just didn't have that 'tightness' they should have had. You know what I mean; it should take a modicum of effort to plug em in; but these ones didn't.

Each of the four 'failing' drives now works. So I've reverted to last weeks configuration on the two most recently 'failed' drives, as a mirror set. I now have 360 gigs of storage! Gawd only knows what I'm going to put on that much space. Famous last words of course; it's not all that long ago 1 gig was unimaginably large.