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Thread: Crashing, hard drive weirdness

  1. Crashing, hard drive weirdness

    I'm having some computer issues that don't make a lot of sense to me, and I was wondering if anyone had any ideas.

    Things begin normal enough with some early signs of hard drive failure on an old drive. A couple corrupted videos, some hangs when opening stuff. I backup some work-related filed and expect the worst. Sure enough, a day or two later, the hard drive crashes, and can't be read anymore. I unhook it and order a new drive, figure I'll do what I can to recover and back up when I have something to copy onto.

    So when the new drive comes, I hook the drive back up, and it fires back up like normal. CHKDSK finds a little corruption, but I copy like 99% of my data onto the new drive without an issue. Happy ending.

    Then, the next day, I go to reboot my computer, and it turns off, but never comes back. It turns on, but there's no beep, no CPU fan, no nothing. I check EVERYTHING, and nothing. If I pull the RAM or the video card and I get beeps like normal. I try a new power supply, new video card, and new RAM. Nothing. I figure it must be the CPU or motherboard.

    A week later, I completely disassemble and reassemble the computer. Now it works, but the OTHER hard drive (not the new one, my main one) crashes, and my BIOS screen reads its ID as "BzBzBzBzBzBzBzBzBz". I power down for a minute and power back up again, and it comes up. Again CHKDSK finds light damage, but nothing critical.

    What the fuck is going on with my drives here? It doesn't seem like normal HD failure. It's two drives of different brands and ages at the same time, and they don't seem to have suffered critical damage. It seems like this must be caused by something else, especially in light of the other issues, but I have no idea what could be causing this. Any ideas?

  2. By my reading you have 3 failures, your old drive was in the box at least twice (1st & 3rd), and both times it was an obvious HD issue that caused it to go down. Was the old drive in the box the 2nd time as well?

    It's also not clear to me which drive the OS is installed on. Old or new? Or neither (i.e. are both the old and new secondary drives)?

    If you manage to eliminate the drives as a problem I'd break out a magnifying glass and look for leaking capacitors, non-working fans, other heat related issues, on your board.

  3. This may seem obvious, but have you tried clearing the CMOS and changing the battery?
    HD problems shouldn't stop your PC from POSTing.

  4. Quote Originally Posted by outRider View Post
    By my reading you have 3 failures, your old drive was in the box at least twice (1st & 3rd), and both times it was an obvious HD issue that caused it to go down. Was the old drive in the box the 2nd time as well?
    The old drive was unhooked for a while, but never left the box. It was hooked up when I had the big crash where it wouldn't post, but it in no way caused that. I unhooked the drives and all non-critical hardware and it still wouldn't post. I'm still at a loss as to why this was, but it seems like it has to be a motherboard problem or maybe a short.

    It's also not clear to me which drive the OS is installed on. Old or new? Or neither (i.e. are both the old and new secondary drives)?
    The OS is on the newer of the two drives that had failures. To avoid further confusion, the oldest drive is a 250, the newer is a 350, and the brand new replacement is a 500. The 250 and the 350 both had failures, and the 350 has the OS.
    Quote Originally Posted by kedawa View Post
    This may seem obvious, but have you tried clearing the CMOS and changing the battery?
    Yes.
    HD problems shouldn't stop your PC from POSTing.
    Yeah, the HD didn't cause that problem, obviously. What I'm worried is that they could be common symptoms of a greater problem.

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