THERE is a way to help prevent avoidable data loss, according to desktop storage company Quantum Corp. By determining whether the drive is the source of a system-level failure, Quantum's data protection system (DPS) spares users from unnecessarily removing and replacing a perfectly healthy drive, hence protecting valuable data and maintaining productivity.

Imagine this: Just when you're one paragraph short of a very crucial report your PC "hangs." Pissed off, you press the familiar "emergency" keys_CTRL-ALT-DEL_to get it back to life. Too bad only the title of your report was saved in your hard drive.

Few more occurrences like this and your system completely fails and finally refuses to reboot. Time is squandered and productivity declines.

The blame is almost always put on the hard disk drive. After all, it's the one that writes the data on the hard disk. Meanwhile, all work done after the last backup is lost, assuming that a backup was done at all. To make matters worse, the system suppliers' comprehensive testing shows that nothing is wrong with the hard drive. The problem lies with some other system component, as yet undetermined. The result of all this is not only lost productivity, but also the loss of every bit of information stored on what turned out to be a healthy drive.

This scenario is all too familiar. Major system OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) consistently find that more than 40 percent of hard drives returned by customers show no failure when tested. This means the PC user needlessly parts with his or her hard drive and, more important, all of his or her data. To avoid this kind of data loss, an easy and fast method for PC users to determine whether their hard drive is the source of a system failure is needed.

Enter Quantum's DPS, a software-based solution available for all Quantum drives that have been manufactured for the past two-and-a-half years. The software is designed to quickly determine if a disk drive is the source of a system failure.

Quantum's DPS is designed to perform its task on both the older, existing field population of PC hard drives and its new hard drives. All Quantum ATA desktop drives manufactured in the last tqo-and-a-half years, including the entire Quantum Bigfoot product family and Quantum Fireball product family beginning with the Fireball TM, can be tested with DPS.

When a system problem occurs, users simply boot from a floppy disk containing DPS. For Quantum drives introduced after January 1999, typing a simple set of commands provided by the system supplier will initiate the test. Or, if the problem is so catastrophic that there's no other way to start the system, users can still employ the bootable floppy. DPS performs a Quick Test that exercises the hard drive. In addition, DPS checks every sector in the drive's buffer and examines the first 300 megabytes of data stored on the drive, where the operating system and other critical system utilities are typically stored. Within 90 seconds, the Quick Test is complete. The results confirm whether the hard drive is the source of the system failure.

If the DPS Quick Test results find no errors in the first 300 megabytes of data and the system continues to malfunction, the user can run the DPS Extended Test. This test performs all Quick Test functions, and it also examines all additional data areas to verify whether the hard drive is the source of the problem. The time required for the Extended Test depends on the capacity of the drive, but never exceeds 20 minutes.