|Hard drive connection problem

My hard drive(s) have been having problems. it seems like my hard drive is unable to connect to my motherboard. This problem has been inconsistent. It works sometimes, sometimes it doesn't.

Usually when I boot my computer, one of two things happen. It works perfectly, or it is unable to boot. My hard drive begins to make scratching/moving sounds.
And the hard drive device does not show up on the boot menu or it fails to boot. There would be the 'Loading Operating System..." message, then proceed to attempt to boot from CD/DVD.

When it does boot properly, sometimes my computer will start running really slowly and start freezing. I would restart and that's when the booting problems begin.

i switched out my hard drive for another one and reinstalled Windows, but the same problem persisted. Both hard drives weren't new, but I doubt both hard drives were broken. The hard drives were Western Cavier Black and Blue.

A few times I got the Checking file system c: message. The type of file system is NTFS. ...Windows will now check the disk. It would begin deleting, sorting and recovering orphan files.

I tried switching out the RAM and immediately, the computer actually booted. But I think this was by chance, because it booted only to Windows Repair. I would get the message Windows has failed to start. Select "Windows Repair" or "Start Windows Normally". |Normally did not work. When I tried to System Restore. Disk C would show up as not partitioned and it would fail to system restore. I plugged back in my old RAM and the same thing happened.

I tried using new SATA cables and changing the SATA ports. No change. Don't have any pictures of this because my other computer isn't recognizing my camera (another problem) -headdesk-

Is my motherboard broken or what? My motherboard is GIGABYTE A-H61M-DS2

Thanks

 

Scratching sounds, the heads are trashing the platters. You need a new drive, not motherboard. Depending on how much you plan on storing locally on that drive, will depend on how large you need.

I store everything on either a local Cloud drive on my LAN, or out on the Internet on my box.com account, so my drives are under 300gb. You can get a SSD for around a $1 a gig, or less, if you look on newegg.com or tigerdirect.com to see what is on sale.

Good thing about SSD's, is they are fast, do not crash like platter drives, stay cooler, last longer.

 

it's more of a motor spinning sound. not like a scratching sound.

 

Still, you should not be hearing anything out of the hard drive when it is spinning. You need a new hard drive.