Primary HDD not found.

[mike]

Hi,

I recently lost two harddrives to what I believe to be the
same event. The drives were both running XP (Pro?), one
on a Dell Dimension 8100 desktop, the other a Dell
Inspiron 8200 laptop.

First, on the Dimension, I started a print job of a 543Kb
file from Ulead "Photo Explorer 7.0)to an Olympus "Camedia
P-400" photo specific printer. The job seemed to be
taking forever so I looked at the print manager to find a
print file size of 0.98 Gb trying to choke its way through
the process. I cancelled the job and the computer
immediately crashed.

After several Disk formats and Win XP installations I
finally admitted to myself that the harddrive was dead.
I.e., "Primary hard disk 0 not found", etc..

I ran a disk diagnostic and it failed.

Before most of this was done, and only two days after the
initial crash, I tried the print job from my laptop. Same
result. Both disks are making funny noises (one a whistle
and one a clicking). Niether computer has ever given me
problems with this exact proceedure before.

I am just about to install new harddrives and wish to
avoid a repeat.

I would really appreciate any help on this, Mike

 

[Jerry]

Hard drive controllers going bad? In two different systems? Doubt it - but
you could check them, how; I don't know unless you can find some kind of
diagnostic somewhere.