Hello Everyone,

I found this thread while researching reasons why my maxtor 250GB drive failed when 
reading a file from it. I have been using 250GB Hard drives for 2 years (mostly Maxtor, 
but a few WD), and other than Dead-On-Arrival drives or complete start-up failures, 
haven't experienced sector/cluster problems -- either the whole drive was dead or 
it was good -- nothing in-between. 

Until last evening when I had the read error. Chkdsk reported the same results found 
throughout this thread. After reading the thread and adding my experience (windows 
software developer 20 years, plus using lots of 250GB drives for an 8 Terabyte database), 
I think there are several causes for the failures reported on this thread. 

The most likely cause for many of them, and the one causing my issue, was the premature 
shutdown of a dell box that had 4 of the drives (windows 2000 pro). I was reading 
a read-only file from the problem drive -- in fact, all the files are read-only. 
I never use Windows indexing, so I wondered how just reading the drive could cause 
a problem. 

Then I realized Win2k was updating the Last Access Time on my Read-only files -- 
duh! From reading documents at MS and elsewhere, I learned that MS optimized the 
updating of the last access time to once an hour -- or.. could it be -- yes, at shutdown..

Earlier in the day, I was checking devices in Device Manager on that machine and 
noticed a problem with the Computer Device/Standard Setting, and changed it to ACPI. 
Then restarted the system (and later in the day shut it down at least once).

Any bells ringing? I believe my machine shut down too early and during the time when 
Windows was updating the last access entries on the read-only files.

So I learned how to disable automatic updating on Win2k: change the value of the 
NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate registry entry (in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \SYSTEM \CurrentContolSet 
\Control \Filesystem) to 1. If the entry is not already present in the registry, 
add it before setting the value. 

And I set the machine back to Standard PC. 

And before shutting down, I first log off, then wait until the disk appears quiet.

My 2 cents.

P.S. I fixed my problem by formatting the drive and copying from the back-up drive 
(drives only have data, no OS, etc to deal with). Drive appears fine.

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