broken harddrive

Lately when someone I loaned out an old WD 120gb drive to reported Windows seeing lockups and booting problems a repair install failed immediately! Yet the WD tool found 0% errors and later found no drive! when run repeatedly.

To rule everything else out the drive was then placed in an older custom case originally seeing 98. NO GO! The drive now sits on a shelf ready to be disposed of. What caused the old drive to fail? Try pulling a literal "blanket of dust" off of the board in the 2006 build that never saw cleaning period. Once running the owner never bother to get in there with an air cleaner! :rolleyes:

That was loaned out until the owner finally decided to see the Sata 1 drive put to use since the 120 was strictly a loaner for temp use at the time until finding out why XP wouldn't go on the other when he tried. (Gee I got in there and XP is doing quite well presently. thank you!)

Besides the drive itself being the problem you could very well be seeing Windows itself being the cause. That would certainly be effected with bad sectors appearing the portions where the main system files are located. The last item before assuming the drive is now retiring on you would be the repair install option for XP. http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm
 
Livzz said:
cheers for the advice, unfortunately i dont have anyother computers here with SATA, so i only have this board to test it on...
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Ahh. 'tis a SATA drive. Hmmm. Well, that makes things a little more difficult. So much for the 80 pin cable idea. lol. Well, try taking it over to a friend's house to try it out. Someone, somewhere must have a SATA controller in their computer and will be willing to help you.
 
The oroblem there seems far more OS related then just hardware alone like a bad drive now being seen. Corrupted partition information as well as the bad sectors developing all can tie themselves together fast enough. If the drive is going on you having someone backup files temporarily may be your only option to avoid data loss entirely unless... and the big question involves money you buy a new drive or have another onhand for backing things up from the 320.
 
Lately when finding out that the 120 was "cooked" when getting it back finally to see if I could 98 running with it on an old case someone handed me an old Seagate 8.1gb model when nothing would work! 98 went right on the old Socket A build without problems!

Some years back I ran into a similar problem with an old Packard Bell where the Seagate drive saw 95 then. The 1.2gb drive was replaced with a 1.4gb WD drive I then had lying around after dumping an old I486 AST clunker. Believe it or not that old drive still sees 95 running since the old prebuilt made it this far for some reason. Who runs 95 these days however? :confused: :P

The one thing you could try would be sending it in to WD under their manufacturer's warranty to see if it was bad to begin with. It only worsened when being used if it was defective to start with.

Otherwise to solve things fast would be seeing it replaced if no other problems are found with the new board rather then the drive itself. If you had a drive even to borrow sitting idle you could try tossing that in to see if Windows woud go on normally. It wouldn't matter if ide or sata to see if the board is what is seeing a fault.
 
Livzz said:
i think i'm gonna have to bite the bullet and buy another one...
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Yes, quite possibly. Just a couple of things you can try on that board first. Reset the BIOS to the default values and try it. Failing that, do a check of the RAM. If neither presents a clue, then replace the drive...but at least they're free checks.
 
I've seen where a drive in perfect working order will appear to the problem and simply load the optimized defaults to later redo the changes from defaults when a system wouldn't boot normally. Bad or mislabeled memory seeing a clash on a new build would also be something to prompt a run memtest since bad ram or a mixup will stall the works.

I find it odd that the same 500gb sata model there is having problems when I run a pair of the same with no issues even having moved them from one case to another. In fact the 250gb ide model used in the build before the last now runs Vista in the latest build. This is why the board or board related in some way seems to come to the front there.
 
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