hard drive, ide cable, or controller?

[FrontlineWarrior]

Hello fine people of the Anandtech Forums, I was hoping someone could help me diagnose the source of the problem.

Symptoms: running chkdsk after booting (before windows xp loads) reveals bad clusters, mostly in the system restore folders. no apparent problems while the system is on, but each time I check chkdsk, new bad clusters show up. i've called up seagate and got a replacement HD, but it is now showing the same symptoms. HOWEVER, this new replacement is making some seeking noises (not clicking like in defective drives, more like the sound of a older/louder hard drive seeking) which is weird because this is a barracuda IV and it usually remains VERY quiet.

Initial solutions: replaced HD. checked IDE cables to see if they were secure. checked jumper settings, and changed from cable select to master.

My hypothesis: As far as I know, there are 4 sources of error: 1. hard drive 2. ide cable 3. controller from MB 4. power supply. I've replaced the hard drive, so I would normally think something else was wrong, but like I said, it is unusually loud, so makes me wonder if the replacement hard drive is defective as well. So let's assume that all 4 are still "fair game" for the source of error.

So finally, my question is: what kinds of symptoms are consistent with 1. hard drive failure 2. ide cable probs 3. controller probs 4. power supply probs?

thank you.

 

[LiLithTecH]

A Bad stick of RAM will corrupt data on a hard drive also, and is also more common.

The replacement drive from Seagate is more than likely a refurb and could very likely
have a NEW problem.

It is possible that the Power cable connected to the drive is causing the drive to power
on and off intermittently, much like power management does. Lightly Wiggle the wires on the
power connector hooked to the drive to see if it makes a difference (generally will be a arc if it is bad).