Hard drive controller killing my hard drives?!

Q

Quimbly

n00b
Joined
Mar 12, 2010
Messages
1
Hi there,
I have an older desktop PC that I'm trying to revive so my kids can use it.

Twice now I've formatted a hard drive, installed the O/S (WinXP), and installed all the software. After a few days, the disk no longer boots, with the BIOS complaining there is no boot sector.

I used a different hard drives in each of my tests, and afterward I tested each in an external enclosure extensively, and verified that they were working fine. They worked fine before and after, just not while in the problem PC.

I find it extremely unlikely that both drives had random errors precisely in the boot sector. Therefore, I suspect something else is corrupting the boot sector. The hard drive controller?! What else?!

Any thoughts on how to diagnose the problem, or what I can do, would be appreciated.

Thanks.
 
What are the specs of the PC? Include the PSU as well.

Yes there's a chance the mobo is corrupting the boot sector, but there's also a chance that the PSU or RAM are doing that as well.

Some tests:
[Testing the RAM]
Download Memtest86+ v2.11 or whatever the latest version is, unzip it, burn the ISO file to a CD, and then boot from it, just like you would do with the XP/Vista install CD. Let Memtest+ run for at least three hours on each stick of RAM separately as well as test the RAM all together. Go for a full 24 hours if you want to be completely sure that the RAM is not a problem. If you start seeing errors, than your RAM is defective or you have incorrect settings for the RAM.

[Testing the CPU]
Use Prime 95, OCCT, Orthos or Intel Burn Tool to stress test the CPU.

[Testing the PSU]
Buy and use a digital multi-meter to monitor the voltages coming from the PSU. Follow the instructions for "Using a multi-meter to check voltages":
http://www.bfgpower.com/troubleshooting.html#DMM
 
I have seen, years ago, an IDE controller that killed drives, both HDDs & a few CDRWs. Took me forever to figure out what it was as it took time to kill each, I just thought I was getting crappy drives.
 
I had a dying on-board raid controller that kept corrupting data on the 2 hdds hooked up to it. Ended up RMA'ing the 2 new HDDs and same issues persisted.
stopped using that controller and life was good.
 
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