Hi guys,

Looking for some suggestions. I had a 40gig drive make some clicking noises then apparently die on me twice yesterday with the old "The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk0\DR0". It was in a system where another drive has died previously. I took the drive out, did the refrigerator trick and then ghosted it up to an 80gig drive.

But now I'm curious. The drive worked fine for 4hrs+ of solid data xfer (Ghost and normal copy) after it came out the fridge, and the data was valid. I thought it would die again once it warmed up, but no. So I ran some tests on it including using Ontrack Recovery Pro. No SMART alerts were reported for the drive at all, and it passed all the tests.

I'd rather not chuck a 40g drive that I can use elsewhere for non-important data, but I don't want to use it if it might die again and waste my time. Anyone have any tool recommendations to test the drive out and (hopefully) find out one way or another? I used to really rate Ontrack, but now I'm not so sure.

Cheers!

Try Microsoft Scandisk, do Surface Scan.

You mentioned that another drive had already died before in that system. It seems that system has insufficient cooling and is killing drives by slow overheating.

NTFS, so chkdsk, but no errors reported.

Interesting re: the slow heat death comment. I have my harddrives in caddies that are supposed to cool it (they have fans and temperature monitors), normally the temps are around 35 - 40 degrees (CPU at 36 and system at 22 right now, according to my hardware monitor). I've removed the caddies and left the current (1 old, 1 new) drives just sitting in the case. Perhaps that will solve the problem.

I guess I'll just use the suspect drive for non-critical data and see if it dies...

May be SpeedFan may give you some extra information.
It reads numerous hardware level parameters of you hard drives, including temp and average temp, and also give you benchmark values for HD of the same brand and model using the S.M.A.R.T (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) option.
They claim they can predict the risk of disk failure in advance.

@Silver:

At work we use the hardisk utilities of "hiren boot CD" to look for possibly broken HDs. It has tests for the most important makes and works pretty well.

I think you might give it a try.

Regards,

Thanks guys, I'll check those out.