Re: Hard Disk Failure

[Lionel Bouton]

On dim, jan 26, 2003 at 09:33:11 -0500, rtilley wrote:
> Is it still possible for software to damage hardware in this fashion or is 
> hardware smarter now? Do drives know not to try and access a cylinder that is 
> outside their physical limits?
> 

I guess not :

Recently I moved one drive from one old system to a new one. The new BIOS
couldn't be configured to use the old geometry -> I couldn't use the drive
to boot (unless repartitioning the 120GiB beast).

During the migration process I tried different geometry settings and at
several times the cylinder number was way above the drive's actual limit.
I could hear loud "bumps" when the drive accessed the higher cylinders.
Each time I rushed to the reset button...

This was with a SiS735 chipset and a Maxtor 4G120J6.

LB.