i dono wtf happen lastnight

I Woke up ... and could hear silence for once !
I looked over at the pc and its off.. and i think oh bloody hell, another power failure.. dammit my downloads !!!
I pressed the power button but but ... the PC wont turn on !!!

I noticed the Stereo was on so !? no way there was a power failure.
i turned of the wall power point waited and turned it on and the PC finally would turn on. strange for such a thing to happen when there isnt a power failure.

ok so the PC is booting and i go wash my face, come back nd the PC is still on the XP boot screen. and the HD isnt doing anything. ime like OH FOR $##^^%&!@@!!

Hit Reset ...
Same thing ...

Safe Mode ...
Same Thing ...

Ime just about ready to pull out a can of whoppass on this bloody thing !!!!

XP Disk.. Recovery Console and ran a disk check + SurfaceScan and it finished, hit reboot and the BIOS screamed at me HARD DISK S.M.A.R.T ST3blah ( thats my Seagate 40gig - system disk ) BAD !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

OMG !!!!!!!!!!!???????????

wont even boot at all now. ime like OMG MY SYSTEM DISK IS BROKEN ARGH !!!!
what am i going to do !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
several hours later i remembered some DMIO errors in my event viewer after de-fragmenting my system partition and decided !!!! i hit my 98 bootable cd and my old cd-rw hoping that it still has ataac on it. and YES !! it did

ataac p0=128

MY HD WORKS !!!!!!!!!!!!

:/

My seagate was completely ruined while the seek was on full.. now its on maximum quiet seek and its working fine.

its out of warrenty but.. what should i do ? I think it might just be that the HD is not designed to work on full power seek and that i should leave it alone. its working 100% reliably again so maybe i shouldn't worry ??

Forgot to mention.. i set full power seek about 5 weeks ago.

I have always found it best to leave the AAM settings alone. Yes, you can squeeze another ms or two out of it, but what is gaining a few ms for a few weeks compaired to the stability of the system. It is sort of like installing a ether kit in a car and using it only when chased by the bad guys. Jame Bond might need it when being chased by criminals, lol.

HaH, HD Turbo Kits !

sorry what does that mean?

btw similar thing had happened to me when there was a electricty failure
the electricty went on/off/on/off/on/off, after that my power supply wanted to die for a while. I unplugged everything, replugged no nothing. went to watch tv
came back, it was working though, corrupt files and some other errors...

He is talking about a hard drive tweak. It is for some (not all) hard drives. Hard drive maufacturers started shipping drives with a technology called Automatic Acoustic Management (AAM) around 2000 intended to reduce noise. Using a utility you can change the settings to slow down the speed of the heads. Alternatively, if the drive AMA was set by the manuafacturer to a very low value - we can increase the value and cause the drive to move the heads faster. It results in an increased perfornance. The down side is it will effect the stability of the drive if the drive is not rated for the fast access.

This is sometimes used by gamers in competition.

thanks
I never had that

all hd's have it even if the manufacturer doesn't say it has it or denys it.
but if thats the case then they have a very good reason. Seagate says they don't support it. they sent me an e-mail reply over the AAM issue and they are currently in court over the AAM patent and also they want to remove AAM now from the drives hardware. Maxtor will probably do the same.

I guess don't mess with the AAM if the manufacturer says it doesn't have it when you very well know it does. you'll probably break the drive ! :| Like it seems i have... well i haven't but looks like ive obviously caused " some " damage