One of the hard drives on the new Vista machine is near death. The drive is generating all sorts of errors when you try to read from it. The drive in question is not new to the machine; I have had it for years - I estimate it has run for ~30,000 hours. This drive, as with all of the drives other than the new system drive are just used to back up data from our main home PC. I decided to purchase a new drive to replace the one that is almost dead.
The replacement drive I ended up with is a 400GB Samsung 3.5" HD403LJ SATA 3.0 drive from Newegg costing around $85.00. Not to date myself, but I can remember when a 15MB (yes, Megabyte!) drive weighed over fifty pounds, was the size of a file cabinet drawer and cost thousands of dollars.
My thought was that I will use it to replace both the 180GB drive that is failing, as well as a 200GB drive which also has many hours on it. I'll set the 200 gig drive aside to use as a replacement when one of my other 200's dies.
My first question was whether to partition the 400GB into two 200GB partitions. I decided to leave it all as one big partition.
The format went fine, and the configuration of the drive as a shared drive seemed to work fine. I could see the drive from the other home computer. I could map it to a drive letter. But when I tried to access it, I received an access denied error.
Long story short, to get it to work, I ended up having to modify the security settings on the shared drive to match one of the other drives in the system. This required creating two new Users groups and a new Everyone group. Quite the royal pain. Seems like Micro$oft would have created a nice little wizard to help users with this task. Oh well, it appears to be working now.
As an aside, I did also find a number of nice utilities that can read the S.M.A.R.T. data on the disk drives. For the XP machine, I went with HD Tune and for the Vista machine, HDDlife. Both were free and I like HD Tune better, but it didn't run on Vista. HDDlife is okay, but the free version is quite crippled. I also installed SpeedFan on the XP machine in preparation for some future upgrades. More on that in the next few days...
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Posted by David at August 24, 2007 09:11 PM