Dell's Disk Monitoring System - Drive 0 Outside Normal Specifications

Hi,

Dell system 4300s running xp sp2 with 768 MB RAM. I cloned the Hard Drive with Norton Ghost 14.0.

Booted fine everything running well. After a while, system crashed with Kernel Error.

Rebooting the machine, everything appeared OK, but now at startup, before windows is loaded, the system reports that Dell's Disk Monitoring system indicates that the drive is operating outside of normal specifications. The original drive was 20 GB, the replaced drive is 40 GB. The replaced drive was obtained from Dell.

Could it be that Dell sent my friend a bad drive or could there be something else wrong? Any tools or ways to diagnose this?

Thanks.

 

Is sounds like you may have a bad hard drive. Can you put the original back in and make sure there are no issues with the computer? Also, if possible, hook up the questionable drive to a computer as a slave and run diagnostics on it. Here are a few drive diagnostic programs if you search a little. http://majorgeeks.com/downloads8.html

 

try running the 32 bit diags, just boot off the driver and utility disk that came with your computer, if you don't have it call dell they give those mofos out for free (same with os disks)

 

Downloaded dell's 32bit diagnostics, and it reported that it failed the confidence test SMART failed. I'll try some other diagnostics from this site to see if it is worth further hope. Otherwise, I'll try replacing the drive to see if that is better.

 

I cloned the original disk with a spare 30 GB drive, and all appeared to be OK.

I then purchased a 320 GB drive for my friend and cloned the original, now when XP boots, asks for the password it immediatley goes to logging off the system. There is a login, log off loop that it can't get out of.

What do you think?

 

Gets a little confusing. Did you clone your Operating System to his drive and try to boot it in his computer, or did you clone his old drive and OS to his new drive?

 

Sorry for the confusion.

I took his drive and his computer, had his original drive as master and a new formatted drive as the slave, in his computer and cloned it with the copy disk option of Norton Ghost 14.0 and checked the make bootable flag and the flag to copy the boot record (they're two flags).

Looking at the drive seems to copy everything, but can't log in. When I enter the user and password, it flashes, then says logging off, and takes me back to the login prompt. If it's not a hardware issue, maybe it something software related? Does this sound like malware, or could it be something BIOS related with this large drive? XP Disk Management sees the drive, all of it.

Thanks.

 

Should I start a new thread in the software forum? Or would it be best to just move this thread to the software forum?

I'm still not sure whether this is a software or hardware issue now.

Thanks.

 

Thanks for responding, plodr.

That's what I figured as well. When I booted the 30 GB HD, everything went smoothly. Actually, the clone went smoothly with the 40 GB HD also, it's just that the drive appeared to be defective.

I thought, maybe, that Ghost 14.0 still may not be completely ruled out because maybe there is some issue with large HDs with Ghost 14.0? I don't know. There are no BIOS updates for this system, that I can see.

The BIOS recognizes the drive. The only thing I haven't tried is doing a straight XP install on the drive to see that all is OK with XP, the drive, and the system.

The reason that I'm leaning towards a software issue, is that the problem appears to somehow be related to either the boot record or the way the file system is read or written. After the clone, with the cloned drive as the slave, I can see the filesystem laid out so I know that a copy has been done.

Booting the drive as the master, all boots well, but I can't log in without being immediately logged off.

If I boot the system with the XP CD and get to the recovery screen, I can't see the filesystem. That I don't understand. Issuing a directory command gives an error, issuing a chkdsk command tells that there are unrecoverable errors.

Why this seems to be OK with up to a 40GB, HD I don't know. Although Ghost says that the clone was successful, I'm not so sure anymore.

 

OK, seems there may be a software issue here. Turns out that in order for the clone to be successful with Ghost 14.0, the destination disk has to be unallocated, unformatted.

After doing so, the clone booted further. However now I get a BSOD 0x7F.

Also, booting with the cloned 320 I get a bios error message diskette 0 seek failure.

Strange, but I believe that software can't cause hardware problems. It couldn't be, for example, that a clone could cause a hard drive to be damaged. It can't be that a clone can now cause a diskette seek error, right?

I'll keep investigating. If you have any ideas, please let me know.

Thanks.