Uncreative Labs

Joined: 03 Feb 2006 Posts: 488 Location: pennsylvanai

as I go thru a stack of older hard drives testing them and looking for files to save, I came across a Quantum 6gb.
it would not boot the system .
there was a partition, it would not format. Many attemptrs to do this 'n that weemed to work. ut very slowly. 10 min not 10 seconmds. even booting from a cd.
I managed, with a generic disk manager to fdisk/format the drive and later there were no partitions. NDD refused to test the drive as did spinrite.
I assumed early on that somehow the drive was bad, but no error meassages. wd clear "wrote zeros" properly and disk manager ( no overlay) easily formatted the drive.
but still the drive does not respond.
I tried Super Fdisk ( on a cd) and it was painfully slow. ( 10m to start)

a quick test/trial with another hd, and the super fdisk cd menu popped up in less than 15 sec.
I realize the drive is going to get X X
and set aside as another bad one, but are there any other programs to try?

Favorite trick: use disk manager ( no overlay) to fdisk format the drive quickly in one shot.
than test the drive with NDD or scandisk afterwards to assure it is good.

Posted: Fri Sep 11, 2009 1:45 am

what other drives do you have in your bad pile? I am in seattle and may be interested in acquiring them

Joined: 03 Feb 2006 Posts: 488 Location: pennsylvanai

I have a bunch
wrote a long reply but hit a key and it vanished!
you want tested drives- right

Posted: Fri Sep 11, 2009 4:12 pm

hmm, tested parts? that depends, i've had better luck with the asis-untested parts than tested parts. hell, i've had worse luck with NEW parts... Tell me whatcha got and i may give it a whirl

Joined: 03 Feb 2006 Posts: 488 Location: pennsylvanai

another slow drive a quantum bigfoot 12g
I tried installing the os on a 12gb quantunm bigfoot drive
it looped around over and over
I got suspicious when I enetered my name fotr the third time.
it never finished.
the same os ( cd) installed properly the first time on another drive.

took the quantum bigfoot back to my pc. set it up as the only drive.
Hiuren's boot cd too 3 min to start and I managed to zero fill with the weastern digital util

quantum disk maNAGER FORMATTER THE DRIVE ( BUT LATER TESTS ) LIKE nORTON DISK DOCTOR WOULD NOT TOUCH IT

tried super fdisk from a floppy
it took 5 or more minutes to start.
it took many minutes to do anything.
question is there some kind of brutal util that will
really forge on ahead and clear the drive.
I suspect track 0 is bad and next I will try that kind of util,.
this is the second quantum brand drive ( different type) that is acting wierd.

Posted: Tue Sep 22, 2009 10:40 pm

funny, i've never had a problem with the bigfoot bunch, though i figured out that if you touch the logic board in a certain part, the drive will speed up double it's actual rotational rate

Joined: 02 Oct 2004 Posts: 594 Location: Western NC

Well, I've had nothing but trouble from Bigfoots. Had a 6GB that was DOA and another that died within a week. Although most other Quantum's I've had give no trouble, I now avoid them like the plague...

Joined: 27 Jan 2007 Posts: 274 Location: USA

quantum bigfoots are only good for one thing,

they make nice ashtrays

Joined: 02 Oct 2004 Posts: 594 Location: Western NC

...and have decent magnets (when disassembled).