Promise killed my hard drives.

[arson_nick]

I picked up a WD 200GB SE hard drive from Dell a while back that came with a Promise ATA100 controller. I had a free IDE on my mobo (a7n8x dlx) so I just stuck it on there and didn't bother with the card, and it ran perfectly for the past few months. Then I got another HD, same kind at a day after Christmas sale. To make things easy I just unplugged my cd-rom and stuck it on the mobo. Last week I picked up a power splitter so I could plug the HD's into the card and put the cd drive back on.

Everything went fine through the first boot. Once I went to reboot though, it went into a disk check. Hundreds of "no file header found at xxxx" flashed up on the screen, and when I finally got back into Windows, it had pared both of the drives down from 186GB to 127GB, and logged 120GB worth of bad clusters between the two drives. I tried disk checks, formatting, and recovery tools but nothing seems to work. Is there any way I'm ever going to get that space back? Or any chance I might be able to get a new one under warranty (if I'm even under warranty any more)? I can't imagine they'd call that a defect.

 

[dreamliner77]

It's possible that you're straining your powersupply. Seems like you have alot of stuff in there to be running off a stock dell PSU.

 

[arson_nick]

Sorry, I forgot I don't have my specs as a sig anymore.

Asus A7N8X Deluxe v2.00
Barton 2500+ stock speeds and HSF
400Watt Codegen PSU
512MB Crucial PC2700
40GB Maxtor
Verbatim 40x12x48x
200GB WD

 

[dreamliner77]

boot the boot drive back on ide and see if it boots (unplug the other hard drive)

 

[arson_nick]

The drive is back on the mobo IDE, and it's been stable ever since, but it shows 127GB instead of 186GB. The rest of the space has been declared to be bad clusters. It seems like it just decided to renege the 128GB+ compatability and roll back everything past a certain point.

 

[dreamliner77]

1) It's 137 gig compatibilty.

2) Think you need to reformat the drive