HDD problem NTFS vs FAT32

[edsmith77]

Good Morning,
This is a unique problem that I have never encountered before. In my system I have multiple HDDs. I have 4 that are controlled with a PCI ATA card. "All" of my HDDs were and still are NTFS formatted.
Just recently, on boot, I had one disk that was reported as corrupted and the system would not recognize it. That is, one of the HDDs that was controlled by the ATA card.
I was able to recover the necessary files from the HDD. I then reinitialized the HDD and reformatted to NTFS, again. And about 3 days on system boot up the same HDD was reported as corrupted and the system would not recognize it. However, this time I did not have to recover any files as the HDD was totally empty. Loss of trust in the HDD.
So this time I reinitialized the HDD and formatted it as FAT32. It has worked with out fail for the past 6 weeks, I have even started putting files on the HDD, again.
Then in a fit of craziness, I removed all files and reformatted the disk to NTFS for a test. And as expected about 2 days later, the system reported it as corrupted and would not recognize it.
So I went back to the FAT32 format and it has been working as expected since then. So I am tempted to believe that the HDD is fine and that maybe that one channel on the ATA card is acting up but that is just hard to believe.
I have not tried swaping this HDD with one controlled by the MOBO to see what difference that would make, if any.

Does anyone have any experience or ideas on the root cause of this anomaly?

Ed

[ahhaa]

I've had a similar problem with a Promise TX2 card that came with a large (for then, & $$) HD. It would lose the HD whenever something affected the registry, like installing or uninstalling software; or even unplugging the computer- then it would go clack clack until windows came all the way up, then on the next boot the HD would be back. enervating!

You might try partitioning the HD and seeing what diff that makes. With prices so low, I'd immediately replace that drive... after considering that it could be the card itself, the cable, the PCI slot, sunspots, ...

good luck, its an interesting problem all right!

[Alex_ander]

I have different experience with NTFS(65GB)/FAT32(15GB) partitions on my portable USB HDD. After 2 years of intensive usage I once got writing error while trying to fill FAT partition close to its capacity. I had to disconnect drive from my laptop unsafe way. At next connection the system didn't show files or partition label saying 'raw format'. First time I was able to restore files with some software, next time it didn't help. This thing never happened to the bigger NTFS partition and I keep using it happily (maybe also because it is spacially+logically separated from the faulty area). I believe NTFS is a more reliable file system. The only reason I used FAT32 on this disk was the necessity to directly connect it to my photo camera.

[Krispy Kritter]

I had a similar issue with HD "failures". They were also connected to an addon card (Promise TX2). I noticed it would always occur if I wrote the drive to is fullest capacity. After contacting Promise, they had me flash the firmware on the controller. I soon afterwards reconfigured my system without the addon card and I've had to further issues.

[bevills1]

Culprit is most likely PCI card issues IMO. I have 2 different systems that were randomly losing partitions, i.e. showing them as unformatted available space, from time to time with both NTFS and FAT32 partitions. I even got RMA replacement of 1 drive thinking it was a bad drive only to have the problem recur with the replacement.

About 3 weeks ago I updated BIOS on suggestion in another forum, and there've been no further problems thus far. Only time will tell for sure, but previously systems would go 2 weeks tops before losing partitions and many times only a day or two. For your case I suggest updating drivers for the card since your issue is with drives connected to the card.