Thinkpads Forum

I had it with them.
Over the past month or two i have had a 10 gig , two 40 gig's and a 20 gig drive all die on me.All Toshiba.
Now i know they were all used drives and 4200rpm drives.
But when i got them they all worked good and installed XP Pro on them fine.
Three of them failed the same way,and the 10gig is full of bad sectors.Laptop running fine and than lock up.When i rebooted it came up " OS missing".
When i try to format and reinstall XP it can find the drive but says it cant access the hard drive.
Than i try a win98 boot disk and try a format with fat32 and same thing.

Anyone else have bad luck with Toshiba hard drives?
Oh ya in this time i did have a few other drives that are still going strong.Thay are Fujitsu and Hitachi.

I had one in my T30 when I bought it. Noisy little bugger with tons of bad sectors.
I revived it for a while with 'HDD Regenerator' but the noise remained.
So, OUT with it, and in came this lovely and quiet Seagate Momentus.
I binned that Toshiba.
[Rant] I have yet to find ANY Toshiba product that I like! [/Rant]

I here good things about the Seagate Momentus drives.
A store here in town is selling them with a 5 year warrenty.Cant beat that.
In the (to many to count) desktops cpmputers i have always liked Western digital drives.
What are the WD laptop drives like?
Looks like it's time for me to get a brand new hard drive. The Seagate Momentus with 5 year warrenty sounds nice.

I've always had Seagate hard disks ever since the ST-412 that came in the original IBM PC/XT in the early 80s.
That one had all of 10MB (no, it's not a typo!)
Then I got a 20MB ST-225, probably the most-sold HD in the world. After that a whopping, over 3" high, 80MB ST4096, a MOTHER of a hard disk that lasted forever.
FYI: the early Windows 1.0 only required 7MB. Compare that to todays bloatware!

Both my laptops run with Seagate Momentus HDs and all my main PCs run Seagate Barracuda HDs.
I must have built probably 50-60 PCs over the years, and every single one of them always got Seagate HDs. I can only remember one HD-crash ever out of the lot.
There's definitely loads of quality in those Seagates!

I had a Toshiba Drive in my first Laptop, an Toshiba m30x,
the drive had 4200rpm and 60GB it was nearly inaudible and I was very happy with it.

My T60 also had a Toshiba Drive but I swapped it with an Samsung M80 with 160GB,
the Samsung isn't much quiter even everybody told me it will but it is faster and has more Space.
The Toshiba is working now in an externel USB enclosure with no problems

Toshiba doesn't build the best drives on the marked, but I did not have any problems with them

cu

I am running a Toshiba drive right now. It's been fine in the last month since I bought it brand new. I had a 30GB Toshiba drive in my Powerbook G3 and it ran fine for years.

Of all the drives I've had over the years, only two have died. A Western Digital and recently a Toshiba MK6022GAX. Maybe I'm just lucky but I haven't really seen a whole lot of drive failures. The recently failed Toshiba is being replaced with another 6022. Mainly because it's a [censored] fast laptop drive and more then enough space for me. Every manufacturer has a bad run of hardware every now and then, just the "luck" of the draw.

If you don't mind spending the cash, you could get a copy of SpinRite and run it on the "failing" drives and see what it can do. Only drawback, it's $90. Expensive considering the cost of a new drive isn't that much, but to know the drive, and your data, will be ok might be worth it to you.

I've only had one drive die on me, and you guessed it, it was a Toshiba. I've used exclusively Travelstars besides the one Toshiba, but now I've got a 60GB 5400 Momentus. Cost me about $10.

Well, I spoke too soon. The replacement Toshiba HDD I just got yesterday is failing. I'm done with Toshiba drives. Now I have to find another replacement and do another suse install, [censored].

I used a 80GB 5400rpm 16MB Toshiba HDD (MK8026GAX?) in a Dell Inspiron for almost a year and was happy with it.

I would never buy used laptop HDDs unless they are very cheap. My data files are precious to me and I want to store them on reliable new drives.

I've had two notebook hard drives die on me and both were Hitachi. The first one was out of warranty, but the second one wasn't and I had it replaced for free.

Got a sick Toshiba laptop in today, with (you guessed it) a dying Toshiba hard disk. (40GB model MK4025GAS).
Took it out and attached it to the connector of an external USB drive.
The POS is so full of bad sectors that it took checkdisk well over 2 hours to fix the worst. Hope it fixed all problems.
I took the first image right after that.
It's being defragged now with PerfectDisk, after which I take a second image.
Then I'll do a disk-clone with Acronis TrueImage onto a new Samsung 40GB/5400rpm/8mb. That drive is so quiet, I could not even hear it!
My favorite Seagates were out of stock, hence the Samsung.

LESSON: stay away from Toshiba hard disks!

Sorry to say "I told you so", but apparently it was one of those threads on the forum that you gentlemen didn't see. I had a bit of a long-running discussion in another conference where I was passing some information that my brother had observed over the course of the last year. As a hobby, he support a rather large array of ThinkPad of various family members and friends.

To make a long story short, he had seem a abnormally high number of Toshiba drive failures over the last year and since he's in the industry, he did some checking around. It turns out that there was some sort of glitch (insert engineering talk that I didn't understand) in the actual design of the Toshiba's that caused a very high percentage to fail at or around a year of use. Luckily for me, I didn't have any Toshibas at the time other than an ancient 2 gigger, so I filed it away and didn't think about it.

And FWIW, he did go on to say that in his opinion, the best drives out there right now were made by Fujitsu.

I love my fujitsu drive. It's been working great since I bought it about 2 months ago.

On a Russian website I found some interesting HD-testing/formatting software:
http://hddguru.com/content/en/software/2005.10.02-MHDD/

There is a separate webpage for a LowLevelFormat, but it won't display, so I'll give you the addie:
http://hddguru.com/download/software/HD ... 1.1108.exe
Both programs claim to be compatible also with Toshiba drives.
They can even format USB sticks.
I've just started the LLF on the faulty Toshiba MK4025GAS from the previous post.
Hooked it up as an external USB-drive.
I have nothing to lose here anyway. I'll report back when it's done.

It took almost exactly 3 hours to low-level format the 40GB.
One-third down the road, the disk was making all sorts of beeping and squealing noises, while the 'rotten' part was being treated.

This is the log report:
05/05/2007 13:51:13 * * * * * WARNING!!! * * * * *
05/05/2007 13:51:13 DURING THE LOW LEVEL FORMAT PROCESS
05/05/2007 13:51:13 ALL DATA WILL BE FULLY and IRREVERSIBLY ERASED!
05/05/2007 13:52:14
05/05/2007 13:52:14 =================================================
05/05/2007 13:52:14 Hard Disk Low Level Format Tool 2.36 build 1181; http://hddguru.com
05/05/2007 13:52:14 Low level format: Generic USB Disk 9.02 [40 Gbytes]
05/05/2007 13:52:14 Device size: 78,140,160 sectors
05/05/2007 15:23:57 Format Error occured at offset 21,318,074,368
05/05/2007 15:24:06 Format Error occured at offset 21,318,598,656
05/05/2007 15:24:16 Format Error occured at offset 21,319,122,944
05/05/2007 15:25:16 Format Error occured at offset 21,319,647,232
05/05/2007 15:25:29 Format Error occured at offset 21,320,695,808
05/05/2007 15:25:39 Format Error occured at offset 21,321,220,096
05/05/2007 15:26:28 Format Error occured at offset 21,321,744,384
05/05/2007 15:26:42 Format Error occured at offset 21,322,268,672
05/05/2007 15:27:45 Format Error occured at offset 21,322,792,960
05/05/2007 15:28:15 Format Error occured at offset 21,323,317,248
05/05/2007 16:51:54 Low-level format is done. You will have to create partitions and format this drive.

I'll have to find out now if those sectors were marked as BAD or not. I'll first check it with Partition Magic before I partition/format.

Do you know if it's compatible with Hitachi/IBMs? I've got a couple of those that are bad and would be awesome if I could get them recovered!

Their website claims it's compatible with virtually every brand.
It did an excellent job on the Toshiba drive.

HDD Low Level Format Tool is a freeware utility for low-level hard disk drive formatting.

* Supported interfaces: S-ATA (SATA), IDE (E-IDE), SCSI, USB, FIREWIRE. Big drives (LBA-48) are supported.
* Supported Manufacturers: Maxtor, Hitachi, Seagate, Samsung, Toshiba, Fujitsu, IBM, Quantum, Western Digital.
* The program also supports low-level formatting of FLASH cards using a card-reader.

This freeware Low Level Format utility will erase, Low-Level Format and re-certify a SATA, IDE or SCSI hard disk drive with any size of up to 281 474 976 710 655 bytes. Will work with USB and FIREWIRE external drive enclosures. Low-level formatting of Flash Cards is supported too. Low Level Format Tool will clear partitions, MBR, and every bit of user data. The data cannot be recovered after using this utility. The program utilizes Ultra-DMA transfers when possible.

Formatted it in NTFS, using the Disk Management tool.
CHKDSK /R showed this:
Windows has checked the file system and found no problems.

39070048 KB total disk space.
0 KB in 1 files.
4 KB in 9 indexes.
0 KB in bad sectors.
67180 KB in use by the system.
65536 KB occupied by the log file.
39002864 KB available on disk.

4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
9767512 total allocation units on disk.
9750716 allocation units available on disk.

I think I found a winner!

RealBlackStuff wrote: I think I found a winner!

But wait, bad sectors are physical errors on the platters on the HDD, right?

So, this program does something like remap them? I've got a 40GB Toshiba HDD that CHKDSK /R /F shows as having 8KB of bad sectors on it to try this on if so

RealBlackStuff wrote:On a Russian website I found some interesting HD-testing/formatting software:
http://hddguru.com/content/en/software/2005.10.02-MHDD/

There is a separate webpage for a LowLevelFormat, but it won't display, so I'll give you the addie:
http://hddguru.com/download/software/HD ... 1.1108.exe
Both programs claim to be compatible also with Toshiba drives.
They can even format USB sticks.
I've just started the LLF on the faulty Toshiba MK4025GAS from the previous post.
Hooked it up as an external USB-drive.
I have nothing to lose here anyway. I'll report back when it's done.

Sorry to necro, but I've been doing some reading up on HDDs, recovery, and various utilities while I'm waiting for my recovery images to burn to discs.

How is this tool different from, say, Spinrite for instance?

Also, according to Steve Gibson, it is no longer possible to low level format today's modern hard drives:

Can SpinRite low-level format my IDE, EIDE, or SCSI drive?

No software of any sort can truly low-level format today's modern drives. The ability to low-level format hard drives was lost back in the early 1990's when disc surfaces began incorporating factory written "embedded servo data". If you have a very old drive that can truly be low-level reformatted, SpinRite v5.0 will do that for you (which all v6.0 owners are welcome to download and run anytime). But this is only possible on very old non-servo based MFM and RLL drives with capacities up to a few hundred megabytes.