Strange problem with new WDC 60Gb drive & Win2K: Scandisk locks up computer

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Sat Aug 03, 2002 12:53 am

I bought a 60Gb WDC ATA100 drive to replace my 2 year old ATA66 RAID array (going from a RAID array to a single drive, yeah).

Used Ghost to do a drive copy, everything is fine and Win2K is running just peachy on the new drive for the past 3 days.

HOWEVER I now can't run a Win2K Scandisk either from within Win2K or during boot before it loads the desktop. Part way through it'll lock up the system.

ADDITIONALLY, I can't run HD Tach either. Running HD Tach is how I discovered the Scandisk problem - HDTach locked up the system and I rebooted, Win2K wanted to scandisk some of the partitions during boot because the system had locked up, but then it locked up during the scandisk process.

I can skip the scandisk during boot and Win2K loads fine. I've scandisked all the partitions from the Win98 boot to make sure they're okay, but I still can't scandisk from Win2K without a lockup.

I can also run HD Tach from the Win98 boot so there's nothing wrong with the drive itself - this is just a problem with Win2K.

Other than that Win2K runs PERFECTLY. All games, Photoshop, you name it.

FORTUNATELY I still have the RAID array drives and I reconnected them and they work FINE - no Scandisk problem with those drives installed, and I've tried copying the drive again and it's still acting up.

Bottom line is that there's NOTHING wrong with the drive, but Win2K doesn't like it (or at least this particular install of Win2K). Wn2K works fine with the old drives.

VERY PUZZLING!

I'm going to try two things in this order:

- I'm in the process of upgrading Win2K on the new drive to WinXP. It's 60% through the install as I type this and the WinXP installer has already safely gotten past scandisking the drive without locking up, so it looks like it may indeed be a Win2K specific problem.

- If that doesn't work then I'll try a clean Win2K or XP install on the Win2K partition.

Mostly curious and experimenting. I'm convinced there's nothing wrong with the drive, just something wiggy about my old Win2K install that doesn't like this new drive.

Sometime next week the new mobo will arrive in the mail and I'll probably be wiping the partition anyway and installing WinXP clean.

HOWEVER if XP does manage to upgrade properly on the new drive and doesn't have the scandisk problem, I may try to see if it'll succesfully survive a mobo swap. One one other XP system I swapped mobos on handled it suprisingly well - that was from an AMD 751 chipset to a VIA chipset (both Slot A). It'd be fun to experiment. This will be going from a Slot1 Intel BX mobo to the IWill XP333 Socket A.

If anyone has any thoughts on why this install of Win2K doesn't like my new drive, let me know.

Meanwhile I'll let you all know how the experiments go.

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EDIT
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Wierd crap! The XP upgrade also locks up when I do a scandisk. WTF? I wonder if the RAID controller is the problem (I'm using the RAID controller with the single drive) maybe it needs a firmware update to properly support a 60Gb drive?

PreDatoR · Post by **PreDatoR** » Sat Aug 03, 2002 1:10 am

That could be your problem FP. That Raid controller might not like that 60 Gig drive. I haven't ever had a problem like that so i'm not of much help but that made sense to me.

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Sat Aug 03, 2002 1:51 am

BINGO!!!!!

You learn something new all the time

I connected the hard drive to the onboard controller and it works fine. I guess the Raid controller does need a firmware update.

wvjohn · Post by **wvjohn** » Sat Aug 03, 2002 7:59 am

I did a mobo swap from a BX to a via kt166 with no problem under 2k - 2 hds on a promise controller- just had to reload the mobo specific stuff -

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Sat Aug 03, 2002 4:37 pm

Well I may try that first. Looks like I'm NOT going WinXP. I tried an upgrade install of WinXP on the copied drive and played around with it. Xp won't recognize initialize my 2nd video card (S3 Savage4) even though I have several XP compliant drivers for it. Can't live without dual monitors and I don't feel like spending $50 on a GF2 MX PCI or something unless I see one on the forums sometime for cheap - this card works fine under Win2K.

There's a few other things that bother me, and I really do love Win2K so I'll try to do a swap and see if my current 2K install (which is recent and very clean) will survive it, otherwise I'll install 2K clean.