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Strange HD behaviour

meltdown75

meltdown75

Lifer
Hi all

I did some work recently on a friend's computer. When he brought it over, it wasn't booting and this is because the HD was blank! So I reinstalled XP, updated a zillion things including the BIOS - in short I brought the computer back to him when I was satisfied that it was uber-updated (4+ hours of work).

However, 1 short week later and I have it back. He was installing some apps that he uses, mainly Katia (sp) which is a 3D app he uses for work. But when he tried to reboot, everything was gone. Back to square one. I do not believe this is due to the installation - I am convinced it is a hardware issue and am leaning towards the hard drive.

When hard drives start to go bad, can they randomly lose all data? I can't understand why else his system would be acting this way. The system is an HP 7920, which is a 900mhz Celeron, 2x128mb pc133 SDRAM, onboard sound/video. If the HD is toast, I am going to recommend he get something new. No use farting around on an old peice of crap with onboard video if you plan on doing intensive 3D work, right?

Any help / comments are greatly appreciated.
 
i had this happen 3 times with WD drives. 2 were 80GB, 1 was a 120GB. I'd reboot and it just wouldn't boot. I'd boot from the XP disc and when it shows you what partitions you have, it'd say UNKNOWN. It just lost the partition. It actually happened a 4th time, but i just kept rebooting over and over and over again, and it eventually gave it back. My suggestion is to have him buy a new drive. Seagates are the mack daddy of Hard Drives!
 
I have a spare 40 gig laying around somewhere, perhaps I will try putting that into his system for the mean time. Frickin computers. 😉

bump for any other thoughts. Thanks nanaki333
 
sweet. this system is fixed on to the next pile of dog$h!t. thank you to anyone & everyone for tuning into the Wednesday night fixit show with your host,

Melty 🙂
 
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