Problem: When is a disk read error, not a disk read error.

[RandomBastard]

My desktop has killed a hard drive for the second time in a week.
I say killed because the drives seem perfectly healthy except for the fact that they will not boot. The mbr seems to be corrupted by something, fixing this only allows me about an hour of usage if that.

So what's wrong? My thoughts are the motherboard or the psu.
Its not the ram, I ran a memtest on the ram and it passed 100%.
So is my IDE controller dead? (They're IDE drives) or is my psu killing hard drives (doesn't affect the sata drives although admittedly I'm not booting from them).

The only symptoms I've been able to coax out of partition magic et al, (I love minipe) are "Partition unexpectedly dismounted (1516)" "abnormal disk geometry" and "invalid MBR"

 

[TdC]

hmm that's somewhat strange. you tried booting with a floppy and doing fdisk /mbr, then setting up a new partition table (doze), or whatever unixish commands your distro required for non-doze systems?

 

[Jupitus]

virus?

 

[RandomBastard]

hmm that's somewhat strange. you tried booting with a floppy and doing fdisk /mbr, then setting up a new partition table (doze)

Yep, that gained me an hour or two of usage when I tried it at first but now it doesn't want to know.

I should mention I am using XP on that machine and that under the repair console I can log onto the distro, using CD based minipe I can also access all my files and stuff.

virus?

I was running AVAST on both disks during operation and the second disk had a complete reinstall of the os so I hope not cause that means its gotten into the bios or something

 

[Kryten]

also worth using any HDD diagnostic software as per the manufacturer of the drive, i.e. powermax for maxtor, seatools for seagate etal

 

[RandomBastard]

Drives where different manufacturers and both register as healthy in their respective tools, hence why I think its a hardware fault, issue is I don't really want to buy a mobo off ebay (my current one is a socket A hence seems almost unobtainable) so i'm looking for other suggestions before I go and have to outlay large amounts of cash :/

 

[TdC]

hmm if your BIOS can enable SMART on the drives, it's worth doing that to read out the failure tables on the disks themselves with the vendor's tool for it or a freeware tool like smartudm (dos mode only) http://www.sysinfolab.com/download.htm

 

[Mellow]

There are also the fixboot and fixmbr commands that you may wish to try.