Welcome to Just Ask Matt! - The IT industry’s answer to the help column, only slightly more medicated. Today’s Just Ask Matt is a recap of Tuesday’s question. I received some great feedback that I would like to share with each of you today. As you can see from the original question, Chris was having issues with either his controller, HDDs, or even his cable.

My immediate thoughts were made quite apparent in the previous post on Tuesday. Some of you felt I was way off, and that is cool. So, without any further delay, here are some of the responses that I received from you, the readers.

Jeff

Ah! A chance to hand out free advice!

Sorry to say that I don’t think Matt is right. Look at the pattern: hard errors from varying sources on the hard drives. Never one type of error from ONE drive. That makes the possibility of it being a real hard drive error very small. Ditto that for being a cable fault, although you don’t really lay out the setup well enough to say. If both the drives producing errors are on ONE cable, then it makes sense to replace (or test by swapping in a replacement) the cable. If that doesn’t stop the errors, then the most likely culprit HAS to be the IDE channel controller on the motherboard. You never really LIKE to think about replacing a motherboard, but sometimes you don’t get a choice.

Oh, yeah, I’d also update any motherboard drivers, if there is an update available, and test it again.

Now, that said, at least you’ll have the chance to get some exciting new technology if you have to replace the mobo. And, YES, of course you run chkdsk on ALL the drives AFTER you resolve the problem. If the system is generating this kind of error, then doing it before fixing the problem is a waste of time.

Gil

Enable Smart Disk in BIOS & flash it to the latest revision if this option is not available to you. This should help narrow it down.

Doug

Matt,

I suggest that Chris buy a copy of SpinRite 6.0 at:

http://www.grc.com/cs/prepurch.htm

It would eliminate the HDDs from the issue, or show that he actually has a problem with one of the drives. Great program! Great newsletter!!!

Mike

Even though it doesn’t sound like cables..remember that he just moved… and it is quite possible they have become nudged loose. I have seen this same problem and by simply replacing the cable it did the trick… Before going crazy on other hardware issues try the obvious even though it doesn’t sound like it would be this.

Patrick

I’d say that the driver for the external drive may be the culprit. Maybe he was copying data from the external drive to the internal drive, then disconnected it after the transfer was complete. Then the OS experienced an error during the disconnect. Basically… even though you can plug in, and unplug the drive while “hot”. I would recommend stopping the device using the “Unplug or Eject Hardware” icon in the system tray, before unplugging the device. If I don’t, I get read and write errors, even after the data transfer is done. I just blame the bad driver. This has been a problem for me of over a year now, but I have had no hardware failures.

Dave

Check Disk Management to see which drive is Drive 1 (the system partition is probably on Drive 0). D is probably a directory name. On my computer, I have a Zip drive that’s Drive 1. It contains My Docs backups, and there’s a directory called D, so I’ve probably seen these exact errors indicating a problem when trying to write to the D directory.

Anosh

This is in regard to your error message:

The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Hard disk1\D.

I recently built myself a new machine. I used a brand new Asus motherboard and used the IDE cables that came with it to hook up a 200 GB Seagate hard drive.

From the get go Windows XP Pro would not install properly complaining about disk errors. I finally got windows XP to install and it would boot into windows at times, but at times would give me a blue screen (which would disappear before I could read what the error message was) and reboot the machine. Booting into safe mode, (which also took a couple of attempts) I looked at the event viewer and saw the same error message as the one you mentioned.

I figured… OK so something is wrong with my hard drive. I downloaded the latest Segate Utilities and ran the complete hard drive tests… which reported no problems.

Scouring through some forums on the Internet someone suggested I change my IDE cable. I did… and bingo, that was the problem. A brand new cable from Asus caused me a couple of days of frustration!! As we always say, sometimes its the smallest of things… :)

As a side note, I enjoy reading your articles… keep up the great work!

Do you have an IT-related question? Perhaps you are just burnt out on writing on the walls with crayons? Whatever the
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