Hard drive or motherboard? Strange boot problems...

A friend got a Western Digital 250 GB IDE hard drive a few months ago. I
installed the new drive, installed XP Pro and a few other pieces of software
for him. About a week later the PC wouldn't boot. It would just hang right
after the POST. No way to safe mode or anything.

The BIOS still saw the drive.
I could boot from the XP disc and XP sees the drive.
I ran the WD diag tools and all came up clean.

I booted from the XP disc, formatted the drive as NFTS (full format) and
installed XP again. Reinstalled the apps and all was well for about 3
months, maybe longer. No problems.

All of a sudden, it happens again. Same thing. Gets stuck right after the
POST. I can put the drive in my system and save the data from the drive. I
ran AV and Spyware checks - no problems. I did see the drive was heavily
fragmented though.

This time I booted from the XP disc and ran Recovery Console. I can get in,
so I ran FIXMBR. No help. I did recovery again and tried FIXBOOT. No
help.

What in the world is causing this? Any suggestions besides RMA'ing the
drive?

NuQ <anon@anon.com> wrote:
> A friend got a Western Digital 250 GB IDE hard drive a few months
> ago. I installed the new drive, installed XP Pro and a few other
> pieces of software for him. About a week later the PC wouldn't boot.
> It would just hang right after the POST. No way to safe mode or
> anything.
> The BIOS still saw the drive.
> I could boot from the XP disc and XP sees the drive.
> I ran the WD diag tools and all came up clean.
>
> I booted from the XP disc, formatted the drive as NFTS (full format)
> and installed XP again. Reinstalled the apps and all was well for
> about 3 months, maybe longer. No problems.
>
> All of a sudden, it happens again. Same thing. Gets stuck right
> after the POST. I can put the drive in my system and save the data
> from the drive. I ran AV and Spyware checks - no problems. I did
> see the drive was heavily fragmented though.
>
> This time I booted from the XP disc and ran Recovery Console. I can
> get in, so I ran FIXMBR. No help. I did recovery again and tried
> FIXBOOT. No help.
>
> What in the world is causing this? Any suggestions besides RMA'ing
> the drive?

Oh, I forgot to mention...I tried putting the drive in my system and booting
from it, but it would just get caught in a reboot loop. Never tried to load
Windows. Right after POST, the PC would just restart.

Maybe there is a bad sector in the boot portion of the drive? I didn't do a
low level format. Should I?

NuQ wrote:
> A friend got a Western Digital 250 GB IDE hard drive a few months ago. I
> installed the new drive, installed XP Pro and a few other pieces of software
> for him. About a week later the PC wouldn't boot. It would just hang right
> after the POST. No way to safe mode or anything.
>
> The BIOS still saw the drive.
> I could boot from the XP disc and XP sees the drive.
> I ran the WD diag tools and all came up clean.
>
> I booted from the XP disc, formatted the drive as NFTS (full format) and
> installed XP again. Reinstalled the apps and all was well for about 3
> months, maybe longer. No problems.
>
> All of a sudden, it happens again. Same thing. Gets stuck right after the
> POST. I can put the drive in my system and save the data from the drive. I
> ran AV and Spyware checks - no problems. I did see the drive was heavily
> fragmented though.
>
> This time I booted from the XP disc and ran Recovery Console. I can get in,
> so I ran FIXMBR. No help. I did recovery again and tried FIXBOOT. No
> help.
>
> What in the world is causing this? Any suggestions besides RMA'ing the
> drive?

It could be a power supply. Has a new video card been put into the box
recently? If the supply cannot deliver what is expected of it, you can
get chronic hard drive corruption.

Grinder <grinder@no.spam.maam.net> wrote:
> NuQ wrote:
>> A friend got a Western Digital 250 GB IDE hard drive a few months
>> ago. I installed the new drive, installed XP Pro and a few other
>> pieces of software for him. About a week later the PC wouldn't
>> boot. It would just hang right after the POST. No way to safe mode
>> or anything. The BIOS still saw the drive.
>> I could boot from the XP disc and XP sees the drive.
>> I ran the WD diag tools and all came up clean.
>>
>> I booted from the XP disc, formatted the drive as NFTS (full format)
>> and installed XP again. Reinstalled the apps and all was well for
>> about 3 months, maybe longer. No problems.
>>
>> All of a sudden, it happens again. Same thing. Gets stuck right
>> after the POST. I can put the drive in my system and save the data
>> from the drive. I ran AV and Spyware checks - no problems. I did
>> see the drive was heavily fragmented though.
>>
>> This time I booted from the XP disc and ran Recovery Console. I can
>> get in, so I ran FIXMBR. No help. I did recovery again and tried
>> FIXBOOT. No help.
>>
>> What in the world is causing this? Any suggestions besides RMA'ing
>> the drive?
>
> It could be a power supply. Has a new video card been put into the
> box recently? If the supply cannot deliver what is expected of it,
> you can get chronic hard drive corruption.

Thanks for the reply. I didn't think about the power supply. No video card
was added. However, there were 3 items that were replaced. The CD-RW drive
was replaced with a DVD-RW and the 20GB hard drive was replaced with the
250GB drive. Also, I added more RAM.

I just looked at the PS and it's a tiny 100W! I guess that's all it needed
when it was made, but 100W sure does seem too little. It's one of those
micro ATX PCs from HP. It's an HP Pavilion XE783.

NuQ wrote:
> Grinder <grinder@no.spam.maam.net> wrote:
>
>>NuQ wrote:
>>
>>>A friend got a Western Digital 250 GB IDE hard drive a few months
>>>ago. I installed the new drive, installed XP Pro and a few other
>>>pieces of software for him. About a week later the PC wouldn't
>>>boot. It would just hang right after the POST. No way to safe mode
>>>or anything. The BIOS still saw the drive.
>>>I could boot from the XP disc and XP sees the drive.
>>>I ran the WD diag tools and all came up clean.
>>>
>>>I booted from the XP disc, formatted the drive as NFTS (full format)
>>>and installed XP again. Reinstalled the apps and all was well for
>>>about 3 months, maybe longer. No problems.
>>>
>>>All of a sudden, it happens again. Same thing. Gets stuck right
>>>after the POST. I can put the drive in my system and save the data
>>>from the drive. I ran AV and Spyware checks - no problems. I did
>>>see the drive was heavily fragmented though.
>>>
>>>This time I booted from the XP disc and ran Recovery Console. I can
>>>get in, so I ran FIXMBR. No help. I did recovery again and tried
>>>FIXBOOT. No help.
>>>
>>>What in the world is causing this? Any suggestions besides RMA'ing
>>>the drive?
>>
>>It could be a power supply. Has a new video card been put into the
>>box recently? If the supply cannot deliver what is expected of it,
>>you can get chronic hard drive corruption.
>
>
> Thanks for the reply. I didn't think about the power supply. No video card
> was added. However, there were 3 items that were replaced. The CD-RW drive
> was replaced with a DVD-RW and the 20GB hard drive was replaced with the
> 250GB drive. Also, I added more RAM.
>
> I just looked at the PS and it's a tiny 100W! I guess that's all it needed
> when it was made, but 100W sure does seem too little. It's one of those
> micro ATX PCs from HP. It's an HP Pavilion XE783.

That definitely sounds like a problem. You can use this online
calculator to get a ballpark figure for power consumption:

http://www.jscustompcs.com/power_supply/