Broken hard drive. URGENT

In January, my PC died. An error of some kind made the main partition on my hard drive unrecoverable. I backed my data up with an Ubuntu live CD and re-installed.

In February, my PC died again. This time the Live CD was unable to recover any data, and I had to use a deep-scan recovery tool to get my stuff.

Last week, my PC died. Another error made the Windows Explorer on my hard drive non-workable, and I had to back my stuff up by command line.

Today, my PC died, with the error message "Disk read err r, Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart". Yes, it said "err r".

I have bought a brand new hard drive of a different make. The old one was a Seagate 7200.12 500GB, the new one is a Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB..

My ideas: CPU, motherboard, sATA cable. These could cause errors.

Memory errors are far more general than this, causing lock-ups, BSODs and the like. This is a VERY specific problem, as my RAID array has never died during this. Only my main hard drive, with partition C:\, bites the bullet.

Go. Now. I need my PC fixed for university. Dealing with large AutoCAD files takes a beast of a PC and I need it done for thursday. I maybe have time to buy one new component in time.

I am at the end of my rag and have visions of failing university.

Is there anything significant to the location where the main drive is?

Even though drives are supposed to be magnetically shielded these days, is there anything magnetic like a speaker nearby that might somehow cause an issue what that particular spot?

Is there no airflow in that spot, possibly making it overheat?

The hard drive is screwed into an anti-vibration caddy, along with two other healthy hard drives. Above it is a DVD drive, but there's a large gap. The caddy has a fan on it, cooling all drives.

I wonder how old the Seagate is. In any case, I'd run a scan for bad sectors on it. I suspect you just have a bad drive. It does happen, can happen, and will happen. Hard drives are far from immortal. Now if the new drive starts doing this, then there's definitely something else in play here. Or is that what has happened?

Can you run a fdisk and post the log perhaps?

The motherboard is definitely a possible culprit. I had a computer fail once due to motherboard problem (probably the hard drive controller) which due to the way it failed was indistinguishable from a hard drive failure.

Unfortunately there isn't an easy way to prove this other than replacing the motherboard and see if that solves it.

Well let us know how it goes. Given both drives had the issue then you're right to look elsewhere. Sounds like you're on the right track to finding the problem.

Something else to note: my RAID array of two drives has remained intact for years.

I'm gonna turn in now, folks. Will continue this in the mornin'. I feel much too tired after raging at my PC, and all the adrenaline has drained out of me.

I would go with motherboard problems on this one. have you checked your motherboard manufacture for any bios updates?

I remember from experience an old soyo board i had, had many many issues. after the company stopped making motherboards (go figure) there was a bios release from phoenix to correct it. (but by that point, i no longer used that board)

I've had the board for over two years. The problem is very recent. It'd be nice if a BIOS update fixed it, but unlikely.

An overnight memtest confirmed my suspicions that the CPU and RAM are fine. All I can do is try to get my work done using an external hard drive; if it breaks again, I will re-install windows and AutoCAD, then pick up where I left off. If it breaks again, rinse and repeat. Once the project is behind me I'll see about getting a new board.

The help is very much appreciated. :3

Hard drive crash number 5. It must be the motherboard.

Ideas for replacements would be nice. I'm eyeing up the Asus P6X58D-E; some reviews say it overclocks extremely well for a board of that price (220 BClk) and it boasts USB 3 and sATA 6GB/s. Second opinions from some fellow techies would be nice, but for university reasons I must place my order before 5:00 PM BST.

This is what I have in my rig, its about $200 US.

It could also be the PSU at fault by not generating enough power. I had one blow a capacitor in it, but it still managed to work, but was running at half the power. I didn't even notice tbh, until I started playing a game, and then either the gfx card would go nuts, or one or more of my HDDs would spin down and back up, creating lots of read/write errors.

Just a thought though before you go forking out for a new mobo

Sorry to hear you are having issues. I have nothing to add in terms of the recommended solutions but I'll put in my 2 inf.

1. The data you have stored is the most important stuff you have there. If you don't have a backup strategy, consider doing it now. Daily/weekly offsites, mirrored drives, scripted/timed backups are necessary if you want to keep the data. If it's not stored in triplicate for me I guess I wanted to lose it.

2. Adding a good UPS(es) was the best thing I ever did for the stability of my systems. I used to blame occasional errors and bluescreens on the OS or software configurations, and even hardware failures, even though I always made sure to use name brand quality gear.

Ever since I got everything on the UPS system, nothing has failed, and my system has been rock solid since. Even things like failing power supplies have disappeared (crosses fingers) from my list of common problems. Must be the UPS conditioning the power (ie., no spikes or brownouts) making the components less stressed.