I am wondering, can hard disk spindown - turning off the drive motors - damage the drives? I've had 2 hard drives crash on me. Both of them, I used a utility that would turn off drive motors after 5 minutes of disk inactivity. They were on different computers with 2 different DOS versions (one was a Cyrix 6x86MX, 150 MHz, 16 MB RAM, with a JTS Corp. Palladium 1.2GB, the other was a Hewlett Packard Vectra 486\33M with 12 MB RAM and a Seagate something 342 MB). In both cases, the hard disks started developing bad sectors and data errors, and in the JTS, a general failure which SCANDISK couldn't do anything about because of physical FAT errors. The hard disks weren't that old. The JTS 1.2 GB, maybe 3 years, the Seagate 342 MB, maybe 2. However, on the Cyrix with the JTS, the CPU had been overheated due to either age or overclocking (not by me, by whoever built the system), and if you ran the system for too long (it started at about an hour but as it got worse it ended up at about 15 min), you would start to have problems. First the system would crash in DOS, and then if you rebooted, you'd get garbage for all files if you even were able to boot. You could boot from a floppy and get the same trouble. Now, this is DOS I'm talking here. In Windows it would be justifiable. But in DOS, when something goes wrong, you better worry. So, the drives would look like garbage if you were able to boot. If you waited for about an hour, the system would cool off and you could boot again without any trouble. This may have had an effect. None of this ever occurred on the Seagate, the system was fine. But when problems first started, it happened ONCE that I got garbage for files. I did a soft boot (I was on QEMM, it was QuickBoot which bypasses BIOS) and got Missing Operating System. I powered off and on again a few seconds later, and the drive developed bad sectors. I tried to boot but it kept grinding in agony. Okay, I'm done with that story now... So, both these hard disks which had a horrible death, I used the spindown program. Can this damage the hard disk? I'm wondering that. This has NEVER happened on a single other system. On my dad's old 386 with a 20 meg disk, he'd leave the thing on all day and it still worked fine. For the 10 years or so he's had it, it has worked fine. Another 386 had a larger disk, it didn't get left on all day, it got turned on and off repeatedly. No problems. 486 with 200 meg, left on day and night, still runs fine. Same HP 486 System, but with 167MB Quantum drive, runs fine. To my knowledge, it used to sit in an office and be on all day too. None of these systems used the spindown. Did I just get on the bad end of luck? Or can spindown damage disks?

I'm not sure you want to spin-down that often (5 minutes). They say the heads fly on an air cushion and rest on the platters when they stop. And there is supposed to be an unused track where they can land without scraping data off. The newer drives are supposed to park there automatically when they stop. Perhaps your utility is not allowing the heads to do this automatic parking?...

I think your problem was with the CPU fryup. If it screwed up talking to the HD, or misread the FAT in memory, you could easily have a corrupted HD, which would simply do what it was told. If the HD wasn't designed to power down safely, it wouldn't do it. Modern notebooks and laptops are often set to power down after a couple of minutes of inactivity, to save the battery. I had DOS/W3.11 for over a year, switched on continuously, with the WD caviar powering down after 30 mins with no problems at all. In fact that HD has gone to a better home recently, where 2.1Gb is a LOT of space!

Could an undocumented type of virus in the spindown software have done this? I had a similar problem which I will describe: I bought Windows 95 on floppy disks and installed it on a 1.2 Gigabyte hard drive. In a matter of a few months the hard drive went out, so I suspected Windows 95 of containing a virus. Normally the wobbling heads will nick a platter briefly for months before the hard drive goes out, but not this. The drive went out within a week of SCANDISK reporting a crack in the FAT and moving data. This became an endless process. Just before the drive went out there was a scraping noise. In this case the drive was still in warranty if barely so, and Western Digital gave me another drive when I sent it back. But I always suspected the real cause was an unknown type of virus.

The WD Caviar 1.2 gig and 1.6 gig drives were nototious for killing themselves. I worked at a computer shop while they were common, and I saw many of them come in dead, with relatively few of anything else.