Can a hard drive fail without showing bad sectors? I'm getting a "failure fixed disk 0" message on boot (halting). Running Scandisk I get no errors and no bad sectors. Could the drive still be failing or is it the IDE controller or something? I get seven beeps from PhoenixBIOS, which I interpret as 3 long and 4 short (have not been able to decode what this means).
Surface errors are only one of a few ways HDDs can fail. They can have motor problems which prevent them spinning up in the expected manner, they can have actuator faults which prevents the head getting to expected data properly and they can have PCB faults caused by failing components.
Modern PC: i7-9700KF, 16GB memory, RTX 3060. Proper PC: Pentium 200 MMX, 128MB EDO memory, GeForce2 MX(200).
Hard drives can certainly fail without bad sectors. Bad sectors are related to the integrity of the magnetic medium on the platters, but there are a whole lot of other p0ints of failure. The heads might not read so well any more, the servo to actuate them might have issues, the controller chip on the drive might be dying, as might any cache memory on it.
Moreover, it might not be the drive itself, it could be a damaged cable or a controller either dying or running out of spec (PCI well over 33MHz or VLB over 33MHz without wait states).
Do you have any other drives you could try in this system? Or any other cables and controllers to try with this drive?
Thanks! Useful info. 😀 I don’t have another HDD, but I’m in the process of setting up a CF card as a replacement drive so I will see if that works.
