Bad Motherboard or Hard Drive

[hockey19]

I have a Dell XPS 4100 running Windows XP Pro with 2 hard drives 1)Western Digital(master) 2)Seagate(slave) both are 80 gig 7200 rpm. The problem I am having is this: When trying to access my Seagate drive a box popped up saying the drive needed to be formatted. It was already formatted to NTFS. When I tried to format another message said it could not be formatted. To make a long story short I somehow eventually was able to format the Seagate drive. Now when I boot up I get a message saying this drive needs to run check disk, which it does and then continues booting. I can write files to the drive but when I try to access them the PC will sometimes freeze. I purchased this drive about 6 months ago because a previous drive went bad. Can my motherboard be the cause of my drive issues? Thank you

 

[RealBlackStuff]

Welcome to TechSpot

In PCs anything is possible, but I don't think the mobo causes it.
Rather, check the cables and the jumper-settings on the harddisks.
Those HDs would prefer a 80-wire flat-cable, rather than a 40-wire cable.
Check that the colourcoded connectors correspond to the instructions. Check that the red control-band is on the side of the connector where pin 1 is. Check all power-connectors.
Try another IDE-cable if you have it (or borrow one).
The first (WD) should be set to Master (or Master with Slave present), not to Cable-select. The second (Seagate) should be set to Slave, again not Cable-select.
Check in the BIOS that both HDs are recognised, write down their parameters.

In the Storage & Networking forum is a "sticky", get the HD-util for Seagate from there and run it.

 

[Justin]

Best way to determine if it is the drive or the board is to move the drive to another machine.

Barring that, move that drive to another channel. Right now you have it as a slave on the primary channel I am assuming.. move it to the secondary channel and see if this makes a difference.

RBS suggestions are good too. Come tell us how it goes and we'll help you more.

 

[Rick]

As realblackstuff mentioned, anything is possible. Always remember that!

But the chances of it being the system board are very poor. The first thing I would check is the drive. Perhaps run a drive diagnostic on it, which you can find more information about here:
https://www.techspot.com/vb/topic7602.html

Yes I know... It is only 6 months old. But unfortunately, this is very common. Even brand new drives can go back in just weeks. I always consider mechanical storage reliability a hit or miss. In this case, you may have missed again.

As for the "drive not formatted" message, this means your partition is corrupted. It is very possible your drive has developed bad sectors and the partition is no longer readable by Windows. Sometimes this can be repaired. If it is physical (bad sectors), utilities such as HDD Regenerator may be able to restore bad sectors with no data loss. If the probelm is software, such as the file system, active@recovery may fix the issue. There are plenty of other utiities which can help you out too.