[colug-432] I/O Errors

[Rick Hornsby]

On Jan 25, 2013, at 23:24, Thomas Cranston <thomas.w.cranston at gmail.com> wrote:

> Rick -  However, there is an outside shot that your controller is bad
> 
> I was wondering about that myself. Actually, I was wondering that after the original drive started going south, but was told the only thing it could be was a bad drive.

Sorry, man. Not sure who told you that, but that's just flat, plain, and totally wrong.

If I under- or over-volt the motor the wrong way, I can bring the drive head crashing into the platters. That's going to be more than a few bad sectors, but you get the picture. It doesn't have to be that dramatic, but if the power delivered to the drive (+/-12V, +/-5V) is wandering all over the place, the voltage regulator goes "meh I'm bored" and takes a nap for a few minutes here and there, it can get ugly.

If the host controller can't deliver data to and from the drive without corrupting it, or sends the drive the wrong or garbled commands, any number of things can go wrong. A bad controller can definitely ruin an otherwise normal  drive and absolutely can and will ruin the data on that good drive.

If in the case that you had another system that needed a drive, you may be able to salvage and repurpose a good drive beat up by a misbehaving controller by executing a low-level format on the disk in the other system.

The good news is that host controllers rarely go bad. The drive itself what with the moving parts and all is more likely to be at fault. Doesn't mean it can't happen.