Urgent: Pc harddrive: big problem

Anyone know why my past 3 hard drives have failed me. They last thing I see on all of them is scrambled writing and then when I go to reboot it is all scrambled start menu and restarts itself. I tryed to reformat with the XP disk because I have no floppys. It seemed like it worked until I had to restart, now it just sits at a random black screen and does absolutely nothing. I am going to try to reformat with floppys but I fear that the hard drive is destroyed. Any information on why you think that this problem is occuring please help out and post. If you need any information about the computer with the problems please ask for it. I will gladly look it up for you. The only thing I can think of that could be causing this is maybe as someone suggested before the power supply is frying it. I have no clue really I would greatly appriciate any help


THANK YOU

 

Motherboard: Shuttle: Mainboard ak32e
Hard Drive/s:
1st) Maxtor model:6E030L0 (40 gig)
2nd) Maxtor Model:6Y080P0 (80 gig)
3rd) Western Digital EIDE model:WD400BB-00DEA0 (40 gig)
System: AMD Athlon, 1800MHz
Memory: 256MB SDR RAM + 128MB SDR RAM (PC100)
Video: RADEON 7000 Series
Windows: Windows XP SP2
PowerSupply: Xtreme (switching power supply) model: lp-6001d (400W max)
It was purchased and built by a friend of my dads as a gift for Christmas (12/25/03) (11 months old)
It stays on alot, 12 hours+ a day

 

usually retail boxed hard drives come with a diognostic floppy. use that to check your hard drives for errors. you can also download that floppy from the hard drive maker. or use a 3rd party program.

 

Hi,

the only time I have had a problem with a hard drive it was due to overheating. So if I were you I would check the hard drive temperatures, most new harddrives has got a temperature sensor in them but you need some software to get the readings.

There are loads of utilities that does this, and I did a quick search on google and found this http://www.siguardian.com/products/download.html
But you might be able to find freeware which does the same.

Check your hard drive manufactures specification overview but in general if you get temperatures near 60 C you are in trouble.

Regards
Jon

 

Is there a possibility your data (which presumabley you're copying to each hard drive) is infected with a virus?

To me this doesn't sound anything like HDD problems, more like graphics card driver problems, actually. The scrambled text, the black screens, all point towards graphics.

 

Nope the virus issue was once what I thought it was but I never copied data from drive to drive and also I had Norton on the 1st two hard drives and McAfee on the last, so I doubt it is virus related

I had motherboard moniter and also I had speed fan, the CPU temp was 90-95 and I think the hard drive temp was 125 although I am unsure well if this helped mt program list on the startbar looked like this [125] [90]

Mines came with the ability to make the floppy but I had no floppys so I never made

 

Ok, the virus was a shot in the dark anyway, but it still sounds like a graphics issue to me.

There is currently nothing to indicate that its a HDD issue. The fact you reformatted shows that the HDD can't be dead or it would fail on the install.

When you say "it appears to work until (you) restart)" what particular restart is this? going from text mode to GUI mode on the install, or on the first boot or what?

When you reformatted did you actually reformat or did you do a repair install?

You've come into this with a preconception that its the Hard drive giving you the problems, so you've not given enough unbiased information to work with, and so unwittingly suggesting to the repliers that the issue is in a HDD issue.

 

hmm sounds like maybe corupted RAM? try running prime95 on it if u can
also try replacing sticks of ram

 

if you suspect that you PSU is frying your board check on the back there is a red switch that should be set to 115V ... if it is set to 230V it's not recieving the proper amount of current, i think that's the european standard, not too sure

 

Yes, it is, and if it was switched to that, you wouldn't be able to power it up at all.

 

I reformatted with the XP disk, first I tried the repair and then it didn't wirk so I did the reformat with the XP disk and it was working until I had to restart so my Anti-Virus Program would load, but now when I try to reboot all I see is a black screen after windows loads. I am going to try a different method of formatting. This method:
Win 2k/XP

1. Grab some 2k/XP boot disks from. (www.bootdisk.com – the file will make 6 total disks.)
2. Pop in your 2k/XP installer disk and the first 2k/XP boot disk.
3. Restart
4. It should load automatically and just follow instructions for putting in the 6 boot disks.
5. Finally it will ask what hard drive you want to install it on. Format the drive into ntfs if it’s over 30 gigs and Fat32 for anything less (just my opinion, go with whatever you want). And just continue installation. (You usually want NTFS though.)
6. Take out the last 2k/XP boot disk as soon as it stops asking for more.

I hope that method works

I am very appreciative that you are helping me and I hope you continue until this problem is solved, anything you need me to look up/do just ask please.

 

hm ... i couldve sworn that's how i fried my old mac(as i thought i had it set that way for some stupid reason) ... maybe it was the 100 degree heat

 

If you switch a power supply to 115V over here it goes POP!
Over there you would just get a very weak supply.

Now, @ Ecca. Thanks for clearing that up. So it loaded to the desktop fine then? Do you install the AV program every time? If you are, that may be the problem. In which case a repair install wouldn't make any difference either (your programs arn't touched, the AV would still load as before).

Personally, I still think its a graphics issue. Can you try reformatting with a different graphics card?

 

Nah right after the windows loading screen is pitch black nothing else
I am going to reformat again, without installing an AV and if that does not work than I am going to switch the ram and GFX card and try to reboot if it fails then I guess I will hook it up as a slave or main drive on this pc to see if it functions

I will make a new post with the results
Thank you for your time and thank you for helping me
Please look back to see the results

~Ecca Ecca

 

3 hard drives failed? Have you tried to reformat them on another PC, while you track down the problem? Your problem isn't the drives but something in your PC. Hard drives are extremely reliable nowadays. 3 dying on the same Pc would be almost unheard of. I can remember the old SEAGATE 20 megabyte problems (yes megabyte, not gigabyte), days. Baz

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