HD status (at risk)

[Ob1]

i recently installed a second 160gb drive so i could set it up as RAID 1. now after installing it and configuring it i noticed that there was really no air flow inside the case. the case has one fan on it but that fan is taken up by the processor. what i mean by this is that dell decided to put some sort of green air vent device that channels all of the cool air directly to the processor. so i was thinking that well i wonder if my 2 160 drives are gonna have a problem with overheating because they are installed right next to each but there are no fans blowing on either drive. so tonight after work i logged on to my server and went to disk management just to check something and now it states that the second partition on drive 0 is at risk, which is where all of my data is stored. the first partition which is where windows is located is the drive status is healthy. last night when i installed the drive there was no problems and everything showed healthy on both partitions. now Disk 0 states online (errors).

is my drive 0 going bad? could it be that the drive(s) are overheating? What could be the cause of this all of sudden, and how do i go about troubleshooting this?

right now im scanning the disk to attempt recovery of bad sectors. what else should i do?
the pc im talking about is the dimension 4700 below for the system specs

[diver203_98]

You will need some air flow over the drives, especially UNDER them as that is where the chipset is. Is there any way you can seperate them? Or add another fan to the front of your case to cool them?

[Ob1]

so this morning i i was messing around in disk management and i right clicked on Drive 0. there was an option there to reactivate disk. so i clicked on it and it the 2nd partition on drive 0 that stated was at risk changed to "healthy". now i came back about and hour later and looked and the drive was back to showing "at risk".

is my drive 0 going bad? i dont hear any clicking noises coming from the drive, or do i just have bad sectors on this drive? i have the ultimate boot cd, is there any utility on that disc that i could use to help diagnose whats going on with this drive?

[glc]

Yes, the UBCD has Powermax on it, which is the Maxtor diagnostic utility.

[Ob1]

i tried running powermax 4.21 but it didnt detect any drives installed on my pc, so i tried the powermax 4.09 version on both drives. Drive 0 is the one that shipped with the pc originally and Drive 1 was just installed on saturday. Drive 0 diag results were that the drive failed the test and that i should RMA the drive to maxtor and back up any data ASAP which im in the process of doing. now i checked drive 1 with the powermax 4.09 diag utility and it also stated thet my drive was going bad and i should RMA the drive to maxtor. all of the other tests that were performed on the drives passed.

now if you look on the pic i included on my initial post, drive 0 is the one with an exclamation point on it, and drive 1 is just the mirror of Drive 0 and does not have the exclamation point. so is the problem just with drive 0 or are both drives failing even though drive 1 is only 3 days old?

any help on this one would be appreciated..

edit: my roommate just called to tell me that my server is making a lot of noise and it keeps getting louder. thought i would write this to see if that helped in diagnosing, but now it sounds like the drive is about ready to fail any second now

[ComputerNut]

if the drive is getting louder, thats a clear cut sign that the drive is failing. Basically, the bearings on the platter motors seem to be failing. My suggestion: get important data while you still can!

HTH,
CN

[Ob1]

i got everything backed up that i needed. now if drive 0 fails, drive 1 should also have the whole system backed up. now is drive 1 showing "at risk" cause its a mirror of the data on drive 0, or does this drive have problems of its own as well? this drive is 3 days old. if i reformat the whole system and start fresh would that help at all, or do i have two bad drives?

here are the test results and codes that powermax gave me when i ran the diag. test on each drive:
soft reset - passed
drive recal - passed
drive identity - passed
drive R/W buffer - passed
read allocation table - passed
scanning the drive - failed

drive 0 - dea86b71 failed RMA drive
drive 1 - de69cab9 failing RMA drive

[glc]

You have 2 dud drives on your hands. Let's hope this isn't a trend developing with Maxtor drives. Maybe you do have a heat issue after all. Too bad you only have two 5.25" bays - Coolermaster Cooldrive housings would help a lot.

[Ob1]

im gonna leave one drive down in the 3.5in bay and put a fan on it, then im gonna get the coolmaster cooldrive like u said and put the other sata drive in my second 5.25 in bay. i hope that should alleviate the heat issue.

[Ob1]

is this the coolermaster cooldrive you were talking about:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16835888209

currently i have both drives sitting right next to each and both receive power from the psu via the same sata power cable. now since im gonna be rearranging the location of the 2 drives when i get my replacement drives i noticed that my sata power cable wont be able to reach from the 3.5inch drive bay where one drive will be placed to the 5.25inch drive bay where i plan to use a coolermaster cool drive to house the 2nd drive. now can i use the molex power connector to provide power to the one that is going to be sitting in the 5.25inch bay with the cooler master since the drive has the molex connector on it? or do i have to purchase a SATA power adapter cable to provide power to the drive? is there any real differnce or benefit in using one over the other?

edit: link for a sata power cable adapter
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16812104652

[Ob1]

arlight GLC, so i ran the powermax diag tool again on each drive, but this time i removed the drive that wasnt being tested so only one drive was installed during both diag. tests. now Drive 0 is still telling me its failing and told me to RMA it which im in the process of doing. now when i ran the diag test on Drive 1 this time it came back with "congrats your drive is certified error free, but when i had both drives plugged into the mobo and powered on i got an error stating that the drive is failing and it gave me a diag code to use to RMA the drive which was de69cab9.

how can the drive change from failing to working properly with no error when the only thing that changed is i removed the other drive from the pc? also which answer do i go with, the one that states the drive is error free, or do i take the diag. code it gave me and try and RMA the drive?

[glc]

If the drive has a Molex, you can use it. The only advantage to using the SATA power is the ability to hotplug it.

Get the obviously bad drive RMA'd then test the other drive with and without the new one connected.