[geeks] HD/IDE question

[velociraptor]

I have mirrored Seagate drives in my x86 box that I've been having
problems with.  SMART doesn't really seem to indicate that there are
any problems (I need to dig out a full explanation of the SMART
report--there was nothing obvious), but running Spinrite shows a
number of unrecoverable sectors on disk A of the set.

I'm wondering if the problems could be an artifact of a flaky IDE
controller (on-board IDE and the RAID chipset is also one of the
Promise "Lite" RAID set ups) rather than the disk.  The disk is < 1 yr
old, while the motherboard is approaching 5 yrs, iirc.  Disk A was in
a mirror set with an identical model and age disk; disk B has been
disconnected so that any corruption doesn't get worse during
testing/recovery attempts.

My next step is to put disk A into a firewire cannister and run some
disk utilities on it from the Mac to rule out the IDE controller.  The
file system is NTFS--the disks are out of my game box--so I will
mostly be going for the low-level surface analysis via the Mac.

If anyone has other suggestions/advice I'd appreciate it.

At this point, I am going to rebuild the box after I get the disk
situation sorted out with a dual boot set up--some version of Debian,
or maybe FreeBSD since my other RAID card is supported in both.  I
haven't been gaming that much, so I think it's time to relegate that
to secondary status on a small partition only for that purpose and
perhaps a handful of other Windows apps I occasionally use.

=Nadine=