Parallels Hard Drive Failure?

S

Scudder

Bit poster
I upgraded my macbook (May '06) with 1G RAM and a hitachi travelstar 100G 7200RPM drive shortly after I purchased it. I also installed Parallels. I have a separate windows XP partition that use for both bootcamp and Parallels.

So far TWO hard drives have failed (First was replaced by Hitachi under warranty). Both times it was just after I exited Parallels.

When I called to order my third hard drive (a 5400 RPM Seagate this time) the sales rep stated that one of the other guys in sales had the same thing happen and he was also running parallels in a bootcamp partition.

Any one else had problems? The failures were temporally related only to parallels so I am fairly certain that is is the issue .... anyone have other ideas? Since the drives are not bootable or fixable by disk utility I cant provide any other information. They just crash and sound horrible when I attempt to boot off them.

Thanks for any ideas or assistance! I cant afford another drive and dont want to give up Parallels!.

Frank
 
not sure how software can break your disk... physically.. Parallels is only read/writing the data from the disk... and as parallels is an emulator, the actual I/O is being done by OSX.
To me, it sounds like a system fault, maybe a power spike, or something ive only seen 3 times in my 15 years as an IT guy, rouge static electricity, as its difficult to believe OSX can make I/O calls to a device that break it... imagine the fun exploit writers could have! ;)
 
Thanks darkone. Seemed fairly odd to me too. In retrospect the only thing I could think I may have done was close parallels prior to the XP partition remounting in OSX but the IT guy at school swears that shouldnt break the drive... maybe screw up the partition but not break it. Im at a loss. Ill have the genius check out my macbook.
Thank you
 
Scudder said:
I upgraded my macbook (May '06) with 1G RAM and a hitachi travelstar 100G 7200RPM drive shortly after I purchased it. I also installed Parallels. I have a separate windows XP partition that use for both bootcamp and Parallels.

So far TWO hard drives have failed (First was replaced by Hitachi under warranty). Both times it was just after I exited Parallels.

When I called to order my third hard drive (a 5400 RPM Seagate this time) the sales rep stated that one of the other guys in sales had the same thing happen and he was also running parallels in a bootcamp partition.

Any one else had problems? The failures were temporally related only to parallels so I am fairly certain that is is the issue .... anyone have other ideas? Since the drives are not bootable or fixable by disk utility I cant provide any other information. They just crash and sound horrible when I attempt to boot off them.

Thanks for any ideas or assistance! I cant afford another drive and dont want to give up Parallels!.

Frank
Click to expand...
Those 7200 RPM TravelStars are nice, but they do run a little hotter than the stock drives. In addition, airflow and heat conduction in notebooks often leaves something to be desired.

My guess is that your drive was cooked to death from too much activity. What I think you need is more RAM. With only 1 GB, you're probably starving either OS X or Windows for RAM, causing them to page to disk. On top of this, with both environments running on the same physical drive, the drive's never getting a chance to cool down.

Try upgrading to 2 GB and give XP 768 MB, disable all of XP's glitz and Indexing Service.
 
Thanks mmischke. I just installed 2GB of RAM. Big difference. Ive configured XP just as you suggested (disabled most of the eye candy and indexing service). I knew I was starving both OS's but hadnt realized just how much. I dont think Ill be thrashing anymore hard drives to death. Thanks for taking the time to help me out.
 
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