Quote:
Originally posted here by !mitationRust
I assume your statement is anecdotal.
Either you're over simplifying all hardware, or you know a lot of the unknown and should work for NASA’s mechanical engineering branch! Because you've patently found a way to throw out, let's say, a trillion different variables! Does a battery have to be at 100% to work? Did it ever occur to you that not all of the components that make up certain hardware’s have to work for the hardware’s to work? A lot of hardware in this world can work at below 100%. I suspect HDD's not to be the exception here. A PCI slot can go bad on a motherboard and the board can still be operational.
In each of the scenarios you mention, one particular piece of hardware is failing. I don't consider a battery to be "hardware" in the context of this conversation, but yes, if it is working, it should remain working. Providing power is not an aspect of a battery functioning properly, it is an aspect of whether the battery is charged. A drained battery still works (talking rechargeables here). A PCI slot going bad on a motherboard means that the PCI slot went bad. The hardware in this case is the PCI slot, whether it be connectors, improper power regulation, or what, it's still the slot itself that has the problem. I have NEVER encountered ANY hardware that just plain worked in one OS and not another BECAUSE of the hardware. In one way or another it was ALWAYS the software.
Quote:
Is it possible that the arm inside an HDD that holds the read and write heads could try and make a pass over a bad sector, track, or cluster on a platter and idle during an WindowsXP install, but not during a *nix install because the head never reached the bad sector, track, or cluster on the platter? (Because it didn't need to go that far for the *nix install)
Test your theory out then, see if it holds water. Run something like a dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hd?. Fill the drive, see if you start getting write errors. Oh wait, you said you got it working by connecting it to the internet... :rolleyes:
Quote:
This is one of a trillion different, possible variables I'm asking about?
"things will go wrong in any given situation"
chsh are you going to say it's not possible?
I would bother answering this, but I mean, as far as I'm concerned the discussion is over, it WASN'T the drive, arguing about what it maybe might have been if a set of conditions that aren't true were true is a waste of time.
Quote:
She's still getting the new HDD.
That's nice of you. :)
Quote:
I found something out though, apparently there's a hidden partition on this drive. Some tools bewrayed some type of a large sum of unmovable sectors on this drive. Is that possible to move, delete, or corrupt? Does Hewlett Packer have some type of special HDD's made from the HDD manufacture? I'm thinking it has a part of the platter that the head can't reach to write or it has a built in chip on the HDD mini-board that prohibits writing in that area of the platter.
What do you guy's think?
This might surprise you, but almost every SCSI hard disk ever manufactured has "hidden sectors". On SCSI drives, it's usually ~9% of the drive space dedicated to bad sector recovery. This is why SCSI drives are generally much more stable and durable, and why an 80GB SCSI drive is actually billed as 73GB (IIRC). It's quite common by OEMs too. Dell puts on small partitions (which you can actually see). Compaq used to put invisible to everything partitions that were used with compaq-specific utilities and would only work if it was in an actual compaq box. It wouldn't surprise me if it was such a system on an HP machine.
Quote:
Originally posted here by Und3ertak3r
While I agree with CHSH.. hardware is hardware.. and it either works or it dosent.. unfortunatly certain software calls place hardware at the limits of its capable operation.. and any timing issues (like in memory) will cause errors.. isssues where a data words are read from two memory slots..
Timing issues are induced when you have incorrectly configured software at an extremely low level controlling the hardware. I think you'll find most of the software-induced hardware failures will end up being very low level.
Quote:
I am not sure of what the HDD problems could be except perhaps a Controller issue..
The tests I mention earlier gives a general idea of the health .. I suspect the Media is ok..
How Linux and Widows use the hardware.. the built in timings.. etc will cause different problems on the same hardware.
I'd really like to see a situation where Linux and Windows use a piece of hardware and it causes a hardware problem that does NOT relate to drivers.
EDIT: Let me put it this way: If I am using a tool with a duty cycle (say a Soldering Iron), and I choose to ignore the duty cycle, and the tool breaks, is that the tool's fault? Fundamentally, it's the same thing here. The low level software (me) is controlling the hardware and telling it what to do, and the hardware is happily doing what it's told.
Take it to a higher level. Say I'm using a Soldering Iron, and I think I know which end is the handle, but I am wrong. You think it's going to work at all?