All my HDD's keep failing

[nissanman]

Hi all, I have yet another strange problem with my computer. It seem that every HDD i put in this computer fails within a week or so. All the drives start off with no bad sectors or reallocated sectors. Then after a couple of days S.M.A.R.T reports that the drive has reallocated sectors. At first this does not worry me that much until the reallocated sector count starts rising by the minute. After about 5 or so days in my computer the drive starts to make windows run very unstable and i start seeing alot of blue screens. After awhile the drive fails. I brought a second hand Maxtor 20GB HDD for my computer because the computer cant handle any bigger drives then that, (computer is year 2000). When i first got it it had no reallocated sectors. Then after a couple of weeks Windows xp started to crash alot. I decided to try and do a reinstall. Big Mistake, i tried installing every os i have, 98, XP, 2000, NT4 but not a single one would install. I installed windows 2k on an old 4.3GB drive i have and set the 20GB as a slave. I ran a hard drive monitoring tool on the 20GB and saw that the hard drive had 639 reallocated sectors. A short while after that the hard drive completely faild. Now my 4.3GB is also getting reallocated sectors and has gotten 34 in the last 2 days. It to started off with none. I tried switching ide cables around and using a different one with the hard drive but that did not work. I also tried removing my IDE Controller drivers and just tried using the stock Windows 2k ones but that also did not work. What could be causing this problem? Could it be the motherboard? or would it be something else?

I also have a 10GB seagate drive that also got reallocated sectors in this computer but i removed that drive before it got too bad. This drive only has 7.

 

[Ph30nIX]

Have you tried a brand new drive? Perhaps all those old drives were just faulty.

 

[nissanman]

nah, havnt tried a new drive. There was appsolutely nothing wrong with these drives until i put them in my computer, thats when they started showing bad sectors. The 4.3GB drive had been running fine ever since i got the computer and only started to show reallocated sectors when i put it back in. Yesterday the 4.3GB drive had 34 Reallocations. Today it took the computer five mins to start and when i check it just before it now tells me that ive got 70. None of the drives were faulty in any way till now.

 

[au5]

Use disk utility to check the drives initially and upgrade firmware

Ph30nIX has a valid point. It is always risky when used drives are in question. In order to facilitate in PDing the issue, run disk utility on your hard drive as soon as you install it and look at stats to validate if your hard drive is good. Almost every vendor like WD etc have a disk utility that you can download.

Usually bad pins, connector issues, and memory problems cause data corruption and you see "blue screen of death" but not bad sectors

Try searching manufacturer's website for firware updates for the drives in question. I have seen that resovle the issues.

Good Luck

 

[nissanman]

Hi again, just wondering, but are there any utilities that can fix reallocated or bad sectors?

 

[Samstoned]

HDD regen fixs some bad sectors
other I have tested never did a thing
to be fair some people reported success with spinrite

 

[nickc]

nissanman, u might look at an upgrade for u're BIOS to see if u could then put a larger hard drive in it and it recognize the larger hard drive. I say this as I was useing computers when they would only recognize 4 GIG drives, at that time there were BIOS updates pretty often to keep up with the changing in hard drives.

 

[Ph30nIX]

Along with the BIOS update, if the computer is old you could have a faulty motherboard, for example blown capacitors etc. If you say they are fine in other PCs, then that basically nails it down to a fault with your PC. Start with simple things like your IDE cables, make sure that they are properly seated, and possibly even try a new PSU. Im afraid situations like thisare difficult to diagnose.