Hard drive playing up - again!

[Bugsy_malone 666]

ok so about a month ago I had a thread on here about my hard drives playing up which were new on my pc, i think it was my 250gb mainly.

it seems to have happened again!

basically wednesday night i think it was working fine, I have my PC set up so that `my documents` is a folder on the 250gb drive I have for storage in my machine why the operating system is on an 80gb, so im sure wed night i accessed it, then lastnight `D: inaccessable, file or directory is corrupt and unreadable`.

I have had this now 4 times in about the past 3 months!

I did wonder if my motherboard could be the problem? the past week my pc hasnt started up to well eg it would get to the point of the bios where it says `boot from CD` (its like a check before it then boots the hard drive) and it would just hang for ages. occasionally it works, yesterday in the evening the pc booted straight up although its a little slow and then i was faced with this problem.

i wondered if maybe my motherboard was failing or something as its like the board is dying when trying to read the drives or something. my previous hard drive that was 80gb started clicking when reading the later parts of the hard drive which is why it was replaced with a new 80gb and a 250gb for storage.

any ideas would be useful as technology is failing me and im fed up with it being unreliable, if its the new hard drive then i need to get a replacement as its only 3 months old!

cheers

[Mickha]

How have you got it set up?
Is the 80 GB the master and the 250 MB the slave?
Try removing the connections for your DVD drives, make the 250 GB a master and put it on a separate IDE connection, I assume it is IDE and not SATA.
If it is then recognised you can run your DVD drives as a slave.
Check all the connections to see if you have a loose power connection, a fault I found on one I was upgrading.

[Wheeler777]

This is very similar to a problem i had, turned out in the end it was an ide ribbon cable, its gotta be worth a try. cya.

W

[arden]

run drive fitness test to the drive

http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm#DFT

its a really good tool and works on all drives not just hitachi drives

[bruceybonus]

if the the drive ends up showing as empty and you know youve got loads of stuff on there.. Ontrack data recovery pro is excellent at recovery, as long as it's not a full hardware failure ( i.e the dreaded "click click! " )... I've used it loads of times and made many ppl happy

[Bugsy_malone 666]

Originally Posted by bruceybonus

if the the drive ends up showing as empty and you know youve got loads of stuff on there.. Ontrack data recovery pro is excellent at recovery, as long as it's not a full hardware failure ( i.e the dreaded "click click! " )... I've used it loads of times and made many ppl happy

Cheers for that, but I already have a copy of stella Phoenix to recover my data which I have done.

what I'm more about doign is trying to solve the problem with my disk as it would seem once every 3-4 weeks it just loses the MBR at least thats what it seems.

[bruceybonus]

Do you have another pc to try the drive in? deffo could be the onboard ide controller failing rather than the drive itself

[Bugsy_malone 666]

Originally Posted by bruceybonus

Do you have another pc to try the drive in? deffo could be the onboard ide controller failing rather than the drive itself

yeah I have, but alas the drive cant be read now the file systems buggered up as it reads the same as this PC.

I'm more looking for a fix for the HD tempory now because im going to get another bundle of parts and build a new machine I think.