i have havign a problem with my desktop pc at the moment

it is an

AMD 4000 std clock
DFI nf4 SLI expert
2GB Ocz Platinum pc3200 2X1gb
2x XFX 7800gtx in sli
160 gig western digital hard drive ide (used to have a maxtor 80gig ide)
windows XP Media Centre Edition'05

the problem is every5/6 boots my hard drive is becoming invalid & wont boot. i think windows has been reinstalled about 20 times in so far this year if not more.

i am wondering if it could be a problem with the hard drive controller on the motherboard. the hard drive is connected to the primary channel & is the only ide drive on that channel.

things i will be trying tomorrow
1. swapping the channels round so my combo drive & dvd burner are on the primary
2. swap the connector the HD is on
3. cable swap round

has anyone had problems with the ide hard drive controller on this board before? or Windows XP MCE. or does any1 have any contructive suggestions?


cheers in advance

well if u havnt touched cables since the problems started, swapping cables wont help, when u format to install xp, are u doing a quick format? or full? do a full, also look into something called "low level format" they run from dos and it writes zero's to ur hdd, cures a lot of problems
if that doesnt work, buy a nice 500gb sata, they are cheap

Download HDD Health and see if it says your drive is bad, can't hurt to swap cables either, they go bad so easily. I am with SS on the new drive idea though, a SATAII drive would be a nice upgrade from IDE.

Uh Oh.......

Thanks for the link Reel, looks like I better get my OS on a different drive ASAP

Post a screenie of your SMART attributes and we'll know how bad it really is, that drive might still be ok for unimportant storage or something.

i don't know how accurate that software is, and 78% doesnt seem to be anthing to worry about, since my brand new samsung spinpoint scored 86%!

nd my 400gig reports 65% lol........seems fine

It's highly unlikely the SMART info is wrong, that's why I prefer to go by that. Trust me, my job at Flextronics is to do failure analysis on SorageTek BladeStore RAID arrays for SUN. This app is pretty good for a freebie, very similar to one of the in-house app I use at work to diagnose HDDs.

BTW all my drives show 100% health, except for my 160GB Seagate. dr_bowtie has the same drive and it shows similar issues too.

That sucks, my 400 is only like 8 months old and as a 2nd hdd it hasnt exactly been thrashed by vista. My maxtor 250 which is 1.5 years old and has been thrashed by vista for just <1yr reports 82%.
At what point would you consider it a problem or do you just wait for symptom's?

I am curious as to what the OP has to say and I don't't want to derail this thread any further, so I started another thread here.

Run a chkdisk on your hdd; That should tell you all you need to know about it. If it reports any errors, obviously something is wrong.

got new cables & i seemed to have solved my problem.


cheers guys