Data corruption on 160GB drive

[lechtin]

Hi,

Just wandering if anyone has experienced this before. I installed an extra 160GB WesternDigital drive (8MB cache) for video work, and transferred some files (DV-AVI) to it. Unfortunately, a lot of my files went corrupt (crashes windows media player, media player reports it can't find the right codec, progress bar moves forward but no sound or video), but the same files in the original drive still play fine.

I tried installing the drive as a master and then as a slave in the secondary IDE channel, no luck (120GB Maxtor works fine in both locations)

I am running WinXP pro with SP1 so drives >137GB are supported and the proiper size is reported by windows. My BIOS sees the full 160GB.

I know corrupt data might be from going through bad memory during the transfer, so I fully tested my main board memory (1.5GB SDRAM 133MHz) with memtest86.

I'm running a P4 1.6GHz, so it should be fast enough (I installed the same drive in my brother's PII 400MHz and my father-in-law's PIII 733MHz).

I ran Western Digital's full range of tests including low-level formatting and no errors were detected both in windows and DOS.

I was also running round IDE cables, but switched back to flat, less than 18 inchers (max of the spec).

At this point, I am thinking may be the memory on the drive itself is the problem (the 8MB cache) but have no way of testing it.

Any suggestions from the hardware experts out there? I can duplicate the problem any time by formatting the drive then copying a single 13GB DV-AVI file to it and trying to play it (which never works). Smaller file transfers like digital photos seem to work when the whole tranfer is not too large.

[rallynavvie]

Other processes that are accessing the drive (such as pagefile usage) can throw bad chunks into very large transfers, though DV AVI is pretty tough to currupt completely. Usually the OS would detect these errors and stop the transfer I would think.

I wonder what apps there are out there to compare to files after copying and repair the copy to exactly the same as the original. That would be kinda handy.

[rkr1958]

I had problems with a 160-SATA drive under W2K SP4 with file system corruption. I also had 250-GB & 120-GB IDE drives, which had no problems. Both my BIOS and W2K saw the full size of all drives. Howver, my 160-GB SATA kept getting corrupted. I came across this article http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;303013&Product=winxp from the Microsoft site. (Acutally the article I came across was for W2k the link I've provided is for XP).

Bottom line ... after I added the "EnableBigLba" registry key and set the value to 1 everything has worked fine. This was almost 6-months ago.

Suggestion ... check to see if you have the "EnableBigLba" registry key and if so if its value is set 1. If not, you might consider creating it and setting its value to 1. This did the trick for me.

[Note: Here's the MS article that applied to my case http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;305098&Product=win2000]

[SIRCOOKS]

so what your saying is this one registry trick, helped your motherboard suppport such big drives...im sorry what exactly are u saying...holla back.i have some big drives that i wanna ensure dont crash......holla back

[ViRaL1]

A registry fix won't enable LBA support on your mobo. It just means that if your mobo DOES support, you'll be sure that Window$ does also.

[rkr1958]

A registry fix won't enable LBA support on your mobo. It just means that if your mobo DOES support, you'll be sure that Window$ does also.

Exactly ... My mobo supports LBA, however I didn't have the LBA registry key in W2K so the file system for my SATA-160GB kept getting corrupted. After creating that key no more problems. This may not be your problem ... but it's something you may want to check. That's my point.

[SIRCOOKS]

thanks for the info guys, this may be the break ive been looking for with my big drives