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Originally Posted by Undertoad
Maybe the drive was failing harder and drawing too much power in spikes, and thus causing other hardware problems?
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Disk drives draw so little power as to be totally irrelevant. To cause power problems, drive would draw on the order of 100 watts - become so hot as to burn parts.
Disk drive computer talks to motherboard computer using a fixed set of command - similar to how networking works. There is nothing electrical in a disk drive that would hang a computer. Except when a computer is not so resilient - booting. Have never seen a disk drive hang any NT system except during boot. During simplistic boot programs, the software may sit waiting for a response forever - a hang. Have seen tasks hang due to a disk drive problem. Have seen NT slow to a crawl due to a bad disk. But never had an NT system lock up so that Task Manager would not operate - except when Task Manager could not load from that drive.
Marginal conditions can occur on disk hardware causing a drive's computer to not respond or reply to commands. It is why software designed to test hardware (ie from IBM) is so much better at testing disk hardware; rather than software designed to test Windows interface to hardware (Microsoft).
This being only background information - when that next drive fails. Meanwhile a drive failure should have been recorded in Microsoft's event (system) log. Find it using HELP. Also the drive hardware (an IBM creation) would have data to indicate ongoing failures. Forgot what they call that function - smart something. Just another reason why IBM hardware test software could have been more useful - I believe it is now a Toshiba product.