Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!crdgw1!uunet!tate!gordons
From: gordons@dbase.A-T.COM (Gordon Storga)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc
Subject: Re: Hard disk poops out when "warm"
Message-ID: <1991Jun3.234045.26074@dbase.A-T.COM>
Date: 3 Jun 91 23:40:45 GMT
References: <1991Jun3.032541.20012@informix.com> <1991Jun3.200730.10013@news.larc.nasa.gov>
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Organization: Ashton-Tate, Inc.
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In article <1991Jun3.200730.10013@news.larc.nasa.gov> jcburt@ipsun.larc.nasa.gov (John Burton) writes:
>In article <1991Jun3.032541.20012@informix.com> robs@infmx.informix.com (Robert Schneider) writes:
>>
>>A question for all you hard disk mavens:
>>
>>I've got a Bleeding Edge Model D 4.77 MHZ PC, with
>>a 30 mb hard drive.  I've noticed something fairly
>>peculiar as follows:
>>
>>When "cold" e.g. freshly booted, I can access the hard
>>drive no problem.  After about 5 minutes or so, I begin
>>to get seek errors.  No matter what I do, I can't get at 
>>the damn drive.  Running 'fdisk' off drive A, I am
>>told that the FAT is gone and that there is no partition
>>on C.  Of course, this is not the case.  If I power off
>>the PC and *immediately* turn it back on, drive C is
>>still unavailable.  If I wait an hour or so, and then power
>>up, the problem repeats itself as originally stated, e.g.
>>5 minutes of pleasure followed by infinite pain.
>>
>>Does anyone have an idea about what this could be?  I can
>>use the PC basically as a one floppy machine right now.
>>I'd like to have the hard disk back.
>
>I'm not sure, but it sounds like a thermal expansion problem to 
>me...When was the last time you did a low level format / fdisk
>on you drive? (not recently?) when/if you did do a LLF/FDISK,
>did you do it when the disk was cold (just after bootup) or was it

I would suggest you remove and reseat the card.  My wife's system had
similar symptoms and it turned out to be a faulty card.  Also, I friend of
mine had the exact same symptoms, but reseating his HD controller card
solved the problem.

Try the inexpensive solutions first.


Gordon