IBM Deskstar75GXP 45 gig partions

[Magneto]

Hello,
I am looking for a little advice. Yesterday, I partitioned my 45 gig hard drive using Partition Commander 6.0
I made a 2 gig partition for Windows, a 30gig partition for my programs, a 1 gig partion for a swapfile, and the remainder for "MY" files and such. All of the partitions are FAT32, save the small swapfile partion which is FAT16.
After all of this was completed, I re-installed Win98 and Win98SE updates on C:, and I decided to run scandisk and then defrag it. Scandisk ran without a hitch, but as I started running Defrag, at about 50% through the process, my drive began making a funny sounding scratching/rubbing noise that I've never heard on any drive. It's as though it got lost somewhere in there, and couldn't find its place. The process halted, and Windows informed me that I had a problem, and that I needed to run ScanDisk and select the thorough option and run the surface scan. I tried doing that, but scandisk ran into the same problem as Defrag did earlier.I am able to defrag the d:,e:,and f: partions normally.
The hard disk is running just fine, and I've got it connected to my Promise U100 controller as the "master" on my Asus A7V mobo, using the 1.60 build 33 drivers. I know some of you are probably running the same mobo and setup.
Could I have damaged my hard drive by partitioning it? Can that happen?
My system is about 4 months old now, but I've never heard a funny peep out of the hard drive. I am wondering if it could be a problem with the U100 Promise controller.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Phil

 

[Magneto]

Addition to my previous post: I do remember something that happened immeditately after installing the drivers for the Promise U100 onboard controller. I have 2 versions of the same drivers, and after installing the first set, I heard the rubbing/scratching noise while Windows was rebooting. After it booted, I re-installed the second set of drivers and the noise seemed to disappear. I had thought that I had possibly installed the wrong drivers, but for the life of me this makes no sense at all.
Phil

 

[Guest]

Hello Phil,

Your post sounds a lot like "Major Hard Drive Problem. Please Help" also on this forum posted on 02/12/01 11:28 or "Help - HD makes weird noises" posted on 02/11/01 07:33.

Check these posts out and see what happened to them.

Good Luck.

By the way, problems can be encountered when partitioning large drives hooked up to the Promise ata100 controller. I used partition magic and the drives became totally inaccessible to Windows. Whether the drive was a master OR slave the machine would never boot with the drive attached to any of the disk controllers. The same if I tried to boot from floppies. So I attached the drive to Linux and saw what had happened. Partition Magic had created 60 primary partitions. That's why windoze couldn't boot. I could delete all the partitions in Linux and the drive became usable in Windoze again. I called the vendor and they said that there are problems with the ata100 Promise controller when copying large files or partitions. So maybe there's a link between what happened to me and what you were doing, I don't know.

 

[Magneto]

MY PROBLEM HAS BEEN CORRECTED:
Thanks to everyone that replied to my post.
I had to connect the drive to the primary ATA66 channel and run IBM's Drive fitness test. The problem was bad sectors on the drive. The DFT tool fixed this, I ran the DFT test again, and the drive appeared to pass all tests ok. I got the "NO errors" code, which leaves me breathing a bit easier. I then re-partitioned again with Partition Commander, ran Scandisk to make sure I wasn't having the same problems, and installed Win98SE on partition C: Everything went ok. I then shutdown and re-connected the the Promise ATA100 controller, and things are just fine right now. I defragged the C,D,E,F partitions, and hopefully this was just an isolated incident.
Maybe this will help anyone having the same problems that I am having.
Phil