HELP - Two drives are giving me the same error

[rc23]

Earlier this week my hard drives started acting up. What happens is after running for a while my C drive starts to make an odd "errr" noise. It then locks up the PC and give me a "Cannot access drive C: error". After this BIOS won't detect either of my drives, unless power off first.

I figured it was a bad hard drive. So I pulled my C: drive (IBM Deskstar 60g) and moved my slave drive (Seagate 30g) to be a single drive. Here's the problem. After I installed windows and everything the Seagate drive has started with the same error and it is making the same "errr" noise.

I really don't know how to trouble shoot this. Any advice would be helpful.

 

[rc23]

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[BarnyardMonkey]

If you haven't tried allready,i'd change that IDE cable thats on your Primary IDE Controller.
then boot up without the slave drive for awhile and see if it does it again.

sounds like a bad cable.

Or possibly an IDE Controller conflict in windows since it seems to work fine till windows is installed.


Good Luck.



Shawn.

 

[rc23]

Thanks, for the suggestion. I think I have a older ribbon cable around someplace. It's not an ultra DMA cable, but will work for testing.

 

[rc23]

Swapping cables didn't help. Right now I am running my old slave drive as a single/master drive.

One thing I've noticed is my PC will lock-up and the drive will make the "errr" noise quickly if I try to defrag the drive. With normal use the error doesn't pop-up for 30 minutes to an hour. If I run defrag it shows up almost imediately.

 

[JustinLerner]

Sounds like two bad drives, although that seems unlikely. Maybe the controller is failing (on the motherboard).

Can you run scandisk in Windows or a drive diagnostic utility from DOS? Have you run the IBM S.M.A.R.T utility with SMART enabled in BIOS? (SMART is for drive analysis and problem reporting - for the user).