Hard drives failing at an alarming rate

Dell Inspiron One 2305 (all-in-one touch screen PC) - this PC has had 3 hard drives fail in the past 14 months. This is WAY too many. If even one had failed in 14 months I would say that's too many. I have run the Dell bootable hardware diagnostic and everything passes 100% except for (of course) the hard drive. The drive is a WD 1tb, and when I try to run the WD factory diagnostic, the PC goes nutso and the screen fills with random scrolling characters. I ran the Hitachi/IBM hard drive diagnostic which is a great all purpose all brands diagnostic tool, and it reported the drive was bad, confirming the results reported by the Dell tool. The last new hard drive (the WD 1tb) was installed about 2 weeks ago, and has now failed. Why is this PC burning thru hard drives so fast? The motherboard passed all the tests on the Dell diagnostic boot disc, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything. Because the PC is an all-in-one, maybe the internal temps are getting too high and burning the drives?

Any input or thoughts will be appreciated!

-dlb-

 

Suspect poor cooling or a bad PSU. Some historic temps should be available via SMART tools, try Hard Disk Sentinel.

 

Yeah- but it's not booting to Windows (the HD has crashed). It's an all-in-one so it uses an AC adapter similar to what a laptop uses. We installed a new HD about 2 weeks ago and the PC ran flawlessly until Sat June 2; the owner powered on Saturday morning and was greeted with a "... the registry file is missing or corrupt ..." error with a code of 0xc000014c (this was NOT a blue screen error; white letters on a black background). This error comes up about 5 seconds after powering on the PC.

EDIT- the error message has changed in the past 40 minutes.... it now simply states "A disk read error has occurred. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart".
:confused

 

Sounds like the laptop might be failing it self like a mental break down:-D

But that is kinda odd that 3 HD's would fail in less then a year.May be there just Bad HD's you can get those from time to time just like Ram you can all so get a Bad Batch of them too.Just like The HD's you replace could all so be a bad batch.

Have you Run any kinda Virus or malware scans that could be causing this issue.

 

Hook up the HDD(s) to a desktop and run Sentinel from there.

If it's run from a power pack, then the PSU section of the mother/daughter -board is suspect.

 

@ Goldenskull: it's not a laptop, it's an all-in-one PC with everything packed in behind the 23" LCD touch screen display. And, yes, I suppose it could be simply bad luck w/ the hard drives, but one was a Seagate (the original), the 2nd was a Hitachi, and the 3rd was a Western Digital. Seems a bit unlikely that 3 different drives from 3 different manufacturers purchased separately over the course of 12-14mo would all be bad, especially considering they all did work fine for various lengths of time. And no, I have not run any malware scans. The PC does not boot to Windows, and now most of my diagnostic tools refuse to recognize that the drive is installed even though the BIOS says it's there.

@ satrow: removing the drive to connect it to a different PC is my plan, but this all-in-one is PAIN to open up; I'm afraid I'm going to break the plastic on the back, but I'm working on it. I also plan to install a temp hard drive that has tested 100% healthy on a different PC. Then I'll install a temp OS to it just to see how it behaves for a day or two, this might tell me something.... maybe....

 

I had a All in one pc be for they kinda suck hard to update mine was a Compaq Presario 2100 that was made back in the 90's it was old school the only thing that could really be upgraded was the ram and it was not much of an upgrade com pair to days upgrades i
think it only could fix 2,500 KB of ram or some thing like that.

Well best bet might be your PSU is going bad.

Or may be its the cable have you tried to replace the cables.

 

I all so forget this CD i have it can auto boot into windows with out a HD present i for get what its called if you can find out what its called try to make one.

Hmm now i remember Ultimate Boot CD for Windows try to make one of them and try to boot in to windows with that.I have a version for Xp i use it when i have issues where i cant log into windows.

 

I have been looking at this computer on the web and it has a terrible failure rate. Motherboards, hard drives, power supplies. Here is the service manual for your reference if you do not have it yet.

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/InsOne2305/en/sm/index.htm

http://reviews.cnet.com/desktops/dell-inspiron-one-2305/4852-3118_7-34390096-1.html