Two harddrives in a month

The wires powering the drive could be faulty... Is this IDE??? IDE Cables can go bad...

Could be the first of many signs to come of the mother board getting ready to die on you...

Could be the Power Supply is dying and doesn't supply enough power to keep the Hard Drive powered up, so it cuts it loose because it deems it on the lower end of necessary components...

Could also be a windows problem of some kind...

Hopefully you get it figured out and fixed, as easily and as cheaply as possible...

IDE? I dunno. I know there's something called a SATA cable going into it though.

I'm kinda hoping it's not the motherboard. I'm not ready for a motherboard-problem

Any way I could do any tests, find out what it is?

-Fred

IDE is a type of Cable that use to be used... I know that here in the states it was Grey with Black ends that plugged into the Drive and the Motherboard and it has a Red Stripe going down one side...
I haven't been inside of a computer in awhile so I'm not sure if they've changed that or call it something else or not...

Only way to test the cable is to just put another cable on it and see if it shows up in your "My Computer" and stays there... If it does, then you just leave it be and throw the old cable out...


Easiest way to test the Power supply is to just switch the power from the main drive to the secondary drive and vice versa with the other power cable... And then check to see if everything boots up and stays up...


Not sure how you could test the Motherboard... Normally people don't have those testers and things at home...
I hear ya, I don't wish motherboard problems on anyone...


So many ways a computer can act up nowadays... I remember one time a computer I had was doing all kinds of funky things... The sound worked just fine, but it ended up being the Sound Card... But it caused problems with the Video, the keyboard, the mouse, just all kinds of chaos on and off... Sound worked fine so I didn't check it, ended up spending over a hundreds bucks for them to tell me it was the sound card, sure enough once I replaced it, it worked like a dream...

last week I had a drive problem with a pc I gave someone. 2 hard disks not working.
I could understand one going but not two. Pulled off the ide cable to one drive & presto drive back.

when you boot in windows the bios checks the partition table & if you have one faulty device it won't boot into windows. this is the case on the ide cable if you have a master & secondary on the one cable.
being that you have sata, your only ide would be to the cd rom unless you have one of the newer type which is sata also.

Red/yellow cable, very thin, only about 1cm wide is an SATA cable:


Thin, but very wide (5cm) grey cable is an IDE cable:


I would be very surprised if you were still using IDE which is very old hat so lets explore your options with your SATA connection.

Theory 1: Your hard drives have both been bad, you're just unlucky. Only issue with this is: it's not very likely to have such a high failure rate. Not impossible but not likely.

Theory 2: As Baf suggested it may be a PSU issue where the power supply is either supplying a bad current to the drives, or not enough current. To find out if this is the case you need to go into your BIOS and check your PC Health Status. A list of voltages (i.e. 3.3v, 23v) should be listed along with the actual voltages running along those channels. If you can tell me what they are that would help. Also if you can tell me what Wattage your PSU is and then detail exactly how many devices are plugged into your machine we can work out if enough juice is reaching all your components.

Theory 3: Your SATA interface (Southbridge) of your mainboard is glitchy. But before we can confirm this we need to find out exactly how many drives are connected to which SATA ports on your motherboard and what mode they are set to use in BIOS. Once we have figured that out we can work on a solution to this theory. Simply open up your case, tell me which drives are connected to which ports, how many ports remain, and then go into BIOS and under your integrated peripherals section tell me all the settings related to your HDDs (for example: where it says SATA/RAID/IDE mode).

That's all I can do for the moment before we know more.

-Cub. =o)

Well it's a SATA drive at least.

The voltages you asked about are as follows:

3.3v - 3.280

5v - 5.045

12v - 12.232

and I believe the last one was 5-something-or-other, at 5.090.

These numbers do not apply to the 2nd harddrive as that has been removed from the casing altogether at this point. If you wish to know the numbers WITH the drive plugged in, I'll need to re-insert it.

I don't know how to check the wattage of the PSU however. Also, by the amount of devices plugged into my machine, I'm assuming you mean the following:

Monitor, keyboard, mouse, internet cable, speakers, printer and a microphone.

Also at this point - only one harddrive is connected to the motherboard. Also through a SATA connection, and I found out by coincidence while searching the BIOS for the power info that it's connected to SATA slot #6. The other harddrive I believe was connected to #3. There are 6 slots in total, according to the BIOS.

ADDITIONAL INFO:

When I try to restart my computer with the supposedly faulty drive plugged in - the drive makes pretty nasty noises. Hiccups, glitches, scratching sounds that you know shouldn't be coming from a hard drive. Then it goes quiet for a long while, and also the bootup process takes friggin' forever.

That's all I got for you at this point in time, I'm afraid. Thanks for the help so far, though!

-Fred

psu should have a label at the side or back,
also if your drive is dead it will not show up in the bios, unless it is giving you reading from before. You can click on the drive in the bios & if it's dead it will show not drive connected & your boot option will only show dvd/cd.

bad disks give you a ticking sound

Then I guess it's just me being unlucky. There's a definite ticking sound.

But can my drive have gotten that ticking sound and gone bad from something else that was wrong in my computer? Meaning if I just replace it with a fresh drive, will that fresh drive also go bad in a few weeks time?

-Fred

Oh and yeah - Would this problem occur if both my harddrives (I have only two) were registered as the Master Harddrive?

I remember an error I got when trying to reboot my computer earlier that I had an error with the Master Harddrive in SATA slot #3. Press F1 to continue. Or something to that effect.

I know for a fact that the other harddrive (the one that still works) is supposed to be the Master, at least it's the one I boot from and that has the Windows partition on it.

Dunno if that helps any, but thought I'd mention it.

-Fred

The whole master/slave issue is no longer a problem with SATA drives... so you don't need to set any jumpers or anything like you used to with the older IDE drives.

Also, if you can find out in BIOS what mode your Sata drives are running in that would help diagnose the issue. What is the excet model of your motherboard and I can look up the sections you need to pay attention to. It's usually in a section called "integrated peripherals" or something like that. Your HDD modes should be AHCI/IDE/RAID. Usually it is also good practise to place your drives in either that first two or the last two SATA ports. Mainly becuase the first two might be reserved for RAID, and a bad raid controller can cause issues so you want to avoid those ports. But once again if you tell me your exact model number I can look this all up for you.

Download this piece of software: http://www.cpuid.com/cpuz.php

It will tell you all the details about all the hardware in your system. Can you do me an even bigger favour and take a screenshot of every tab in that program. i.e. the CPU tab, the memory tab, the motherboard tab.

-Cub. =o)

yes you haven't had to set the jumpers on a hard disk for a while now. the only ide cables I use is the round ones which take up less room which is only for the floppy & dvd.

I was also going to suggest a screen dump of the bios screens.

Well that just shows how long it has been since I've been inside a computer... *sigh*

I should probably crack open a case and re-educate myself a little... Sorry I can't help any further Fred, but I do hope you get it sorted out in the cheapest and least frustrated way...

If you do bet on it being your luck and get a 3rd drive and it goes bad, then I would suggest taking it to a Tech Shop, even though they are over priced, buying Hard Drives left and right would be even more so...

But I don't think it's your luck...

fred,

found this post from a guy who is having hard disks go on him- 3 in the last year.
http://www.cpuid.com/download/hwmonitor ... _setup.exe
try this also

11.3 V under minimal load is low considering it will drop further under load probably down to 11 V or LESS..

Now as you can see, ie CPUID readings, software readings are not always correct. I always verify by using a multimeter. Once I know I can trust the software I feel confortable using it.

And yes low voltage can wipe out your HDD. As Voltage decreases Current increases to keep power constant.

Myself - I would dicontinue usage until you have replaced the PSU.

PS
Multimeters are relatively cheap and easy to use AND are handy for many things. You can get an inexpensive one for about $20 -$25. Put on DC function, insert black lead into the Black pin on a molex connector and with the red lead measure the other two pins. Ones the +5 the other the +12.

Alright, I've been to my retailer-dude and he gave me a fresh new drive. The other one was toast, it seems.

He claims it must've been a factory error, but I'm not so sure though.

Cub, do you have an email I could send you the images on? Hooked up the new drive today and thought I'd send the info your way, see if you can make heads or tails of it.

And thanks mate!

-Fred