Harddrive partition corruption or dying harddrive?

[ShreddedWheat]

My computer has been having alot of errors sys.xml data errors, etc...blue screens of irq less than or equal to. I tested each stick of ram with memtest and no errors. About every few days when booting the computer would ask to run checkdsk before booting into XP and it was always having to move, delete, etc... orphaned files, etc...

Eventually the videocard fried, I used seagate seatools and long tested the harddrive and it was fine. Was the video card causing these problems or maybe the partition was the same partition I had used on a past install of windows xp (I was just reformatting the partition not deleting and recreating partitions)?


Thanks

 

[dunkster]

Tough problem. Could also be your power supply.

I had a power supply failure that left me with a hard drive that was intermittently unreliable. I suspect that the failure mode of the power supply was failed regulation of the 5V line (over-volted 5V supply) before PS failure. Had to replace both PS and drive.

Component substitution is about the only practical approach.

Hope this helps!

 

[Painman]

Start out with easy stuff. Try using a different data cable on the drive that's having problems, inspect the current cable for obvious signs of damage/strain (this wouldn't explain a fried vid card, of course, but there may be no correlation between that issue and the others you're having).

Hook up a digital multimeter to the PSU leads and measure voltages. If you don't have one, get one from Radio Shack for $10-15. It's worth it to own one, even a simple/cheap one. Look for erratic/out of spec voltages coming from the PSU.

Is there a pattern to the errors? Do they happen under certain circumstances (such as high system load) more than other times?

 

[ShreddedWheat]

The errors would usually happen only at startup. I could play intensive games (say Stalker) for hours on end with no errors at all. I'm kind of wondering if maybe my new wireless pci card could be causing the errors though I have it in this spare computer mentioned below and it is working fine?

I have a psu tester in storage I need to get out and test both of my psu. I'm currently using the same powersupply unit on another spare computer basically same components just socket 754 from 939, different video card but one that requires additional power from powersupply. The powersupply unit is an Antec 380 earthwatts. I haven't had one problem with this computer in the past week now and it is running a sempron 1.6 @ 2.0.

When I ran the test on the harddrive in question i did it on another computer with an Ultra 600 watt powersupply unit.

 

[Elixer]

I assume memtest passes with both sticks installed as well? Did you run the test overnight, if not, I would run it overnight with both sticks.
How about running OCCT, and see if it passes that? Let it run at least 30 mins, to check for heat issues.

If both those pass fine, and the PSU is ok, then, yeah, it could be bad drivers, or a corrupted system file.