[Leica] Computer help!!!

[jonathan at openhealth.org (Jonathan Borden)]

On Aug 20, 2005, at 8:55 PM, Tina Manley wrote:

> Dear LUG:
>
> I am depending on you, especially Brian, to save my sanity.  My  
> computer has crashed once again.  I have in my closet 6 Maxtor 250  
> GB hard drives that have failed.
.....

I had a similar problem except that I replaced every single piece of  
my Windows PC ... discs x 2, memory, motherboard, CPU, power supply,  
case etc.   and could never figure out where the problem was, that is  
when I junked that PC and bought (another) Power Mac G5 ... which  
read the discs fine BTW.

I have both an external Firewire 800 and external SATA RAID box which  
I use just as individual discs. These are "hot swap" so you just load  
the drives into the hot swap carriers and plug them in when used.  
I've had trouble with the little external USB boxes.

I very seriously doubt the problem is with Maxtor .. if there are any  
differences between difference discs, they are relatively small, and  
wouldn't cause *6* drives to fail in sort order (FWIW my G5 shipped  
with a Maxtor SATA 250).

I *would* seriously look at hooking up all your equipment to a very  
good power supply with both brownout protection and battery back up.  
Having such a series of equipment problems would make me very  
suspicious that you have AC power issues.

The Mac OS X journalled disc format is really excellent at dealing  
with hardware crashes and preserving hard disc data.

Having also gone through a similar issue, I would second the  
recommendation to just get a Mac ... my life has been much saner since.

Jonathan