Need a Hard Drive Diagnostic

OK, here's the deal: I have an old Quantum Fireball ST hard drive. It hasn't worked for some time, and I keep trying to run a diagnostic on it. I've tried Maxtor's PowerMax (downloaded the latest, version 4.09) and it won't detect the drive at all. Just for grands, I tried Western Digital's diagnostic on it. WD's diagnostic pulled up the drive name and everything, but said it couldn't run any tests because it's not a WD drive.

So here's my question, why can't Maxtor read their own friggin drives!?!?? And if they can't do anything to it, is there another program out there than can test the drive?

 

Howdy kevgp...

If I remember right the old Quantum Fireball ST drives were 6.4 gig (?)...

The utility I used on these drives was GW scan this was an old Gateway utility that would work on these drives...

 

I think it is a 6.4 gig drive. There were a few sizes available, with that being the top end.

I'm using an Acer computer. I don't think this is the drive that originally came with the computer. The Gateway disk is not even running. I don't know if that has anything to do with this not being a Gateway, but I thought I'd mention that. In fact, here's the skinny on the PC:

Acer Aspire 1830
K6 233Mhz processor
32Mb RAM
Win 95 (I think - again, been a long time since the HD worked)

Thanks for the suggestion anyway. The Maxtor & Gateway diagnostics wouldn't even load on the PC, but the WD would. So I tried using the same Autoexec code that the WD disc used (inserting the proper name for the program of course). It worked to start Maxtor, but not Gateway.

 

Maybe because it's fried? I have PowerMax and it has worked on every drive I've tried it on - I consider it the best HDD diagnostic I've tried. You've already said it hasn't worked for some time. Maybe PowerMax can't read it because it's dead.

 

Well...

You might want to try Gwscan on a different floppy, just to make sure it's not a floppy issue...

You also might want to go into the BIOS and set it to AUTO for both Type and Mode for the hard drive...

I'm not sure on the BIOS for an Acer Aspire 1830, but it should be there somewhere in the BIOS for this...

Might also want to want to go here http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm and download and create a W98 boot disk, and use Fdisk to see what drives there are available...

Well...

Ive used GWscan on Quantum HD's on many different pc's that weren't Gateway's and it still worked...

 

Yes, pyritechips, it's probably fried, but I got life from it from time to time. I ran a WD diagnostic yesterday and got info on the drive. But I tried again tonight and it wouldn't work. Either the thing was in and out or it's completely out since yesterday.

Thanks for your help, Jedi_Master. I tried FDISK and retried Gateway's diagnostic (looks like it's using Western Digital too). Both said there's no hard disk present. OK, I just wanted to see if there's anything else I could try before calling time of death

 

You might give Seagate Seatools Desktop a try. It will only perform limited functions on non-Seagate drives (big surprise). I have used Spinrite from Gibson Research to restore drives that seemed dead. Even if this would work, and it might not, why put all that effort into a 6 GB drive? You can get 40 GB hard drives for US$60 or less, and 120 GB hard drives for about US$100.

Based on your description, it does sound like the hard drive might be toast. Why not give it a second life as a paperweight or a doorstop?

 

Yes...gwscan is a hacked version of the WD diags ( according to a Gateway tech I talked to ), sometimes it would work when the WD diags wouldn't on Quantum drives...

But if neither the WD diags or gwscan is seeing it, then it is a dead drive...

So...call the time of death, unless there is some data you need to retrive...