I am going to add my own question to the various hard disk questions posted recently, but from a different angle.
I frequently use my computer to check customers’ hard disks. It is a new computer, P4 2.4-800, Gigabyte motherboard with Intel 865 chipset, dual channel memory. The OS is XP Home. Since October, when I set up this computer, I have put a number of hard disks into the drawer, and gotten various surprising (and troubling) results. I normally do a virus scan on the disk, checkdisk, and defrag it. I sometimes look at the partition with Partition Magic 7.
Here are some of the problems I have encountered. I never had any of these problems on my previous computer (P3 500, ASUS board, XP Home).
Notice that the partition is created with different geometry than Partition Magic uses, and a warning not to use the program to do anything with the disk. This disk showed up in XP as unallocated.
A warning that the data on the disk was corrupted and the Windows would attempt a recovery. (I have written previously about this disk, and reached the conclusion that the problem with the disk was physical.)
And the latest: a 15 GB disk that was running very slowly in the customer’s P3-500 Win 98 computer. BIOS recognizes it. Windows XP shows as unallocated. WD Diagnostics reports no problems. When returned to the customer’s computer, there was no partition.
What could possibly be causing my new system to do this to the disks? My colleagues here, including my disk expert who can retrieve anything from a disk, don’t have a clue.
I would also like to hear reccomendations for disk utilities for technicians.