Need a Hard Drive Diagnostic

Howdy kevgp...

If I remember right the old Quantum Fireball ST drives were 6.4 gig (?)...

The utility I used on these drives was GW scan this was an old Gateway utility that would work on these drives...

I think it is a 6.4 gig drive. There were a few sizes available, with that being the top end.

I'm using an Acer computer. I don't think this is the drive that originally came with the computer. The Gateway disk is not even running. I don't know if that has anything to do with this not being a Gateway, but I thought I'd mention that. In fact, here's the skinny on the PC:

Acer Aspire 1830
K6 233Mhz processor
32Mb RAM
Win 95 (I think - again, been a long time since the HD worked)

Thanks for the suggestion anyway. The Maxtor & Gateway diagnostics wouldn't even load on the PC, but the WD would. So I tried using the same Autoexec code that the WD disc used (inserting the proper name for the program of course). It worked to start Maxtor, but not Gateway.

I have an old Quantum Fireball ST hard drive. It hasn't worked for some time, and I keep trying to run a diagnostic on it. I've tried Maxtor's PowerMax...

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So here's my question, why can't Maxtor read their own friggin drives!?!??

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Maybe because it's fried? I have PowerMax and it has worked on every drive I've tried it on - I consider it the best HDD diagnostic I've tried. You've already said it hasn't worked for some time. Maybe PowerMax can't read it because it's dead.

Yes, pyritechips, it's probably fried, but I got life from it from time to time. I ran a WD diagnostic yesterday and got info on the drive. But I tried again tonight and it wouldn't work. Either the thing was in and out or it's completely out since yesterday.

Thanks for your help, Jedi_Master. I tried FDISK and retried Gateway's diagnostic (looks like it's using Western Digital too). Both said there's no hard disk present. OK, I just wanted to see if there's anything else I could try before calling time of death

You might give Seagate Seatools Desktop a try. It will only perform limited functions on non-Seagate drives (big surprise). I have used Spinrite from Gibson Research to restore drives that seemed dead. Even if this would work, and it might not, why put all that effort into a 6 GB drive? You can get 40 GB hard drives for US$60 or less, and 120 GB hard drives for about US$100.

Based on your description, it does sound like the hard drive might be toast. Why not give it a second life as a paperweight or a doorstop?

Thanks for your help, Jedi_Master. I tried FDISK and retried Gateway's diagnostic (looks like it's using Western Digital too). Both said there's no hard disk present. OK, I just wanted to see if there's anything else I could try before calling time of death

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Yes...gwscan is a hacked version of the WD diags ( according to a Gateway tech I talked to ), sometimes it would work when the WD diags wouldn't on Quantum drives...

But if neither the WD diags or gwscan is seeing it, then it is a dead drive...

So...call the time of death, unless there is some data you need to retrive...