Hard drive problems, please help!

[RoadrunneR]

I've been having issues loading data onto a hdd.

When trying to load an OS onto a brand new WD hdd the CD boots and runs through the initial installations (only on the blue screen when you first try and install) the it says "starting windows" where it goes to begin the XP installation it crashes or comes up with errors. i have tried installing 5 different OS's and they all crash or come up with errors in just about the same stage.

The thing that makes this stranger is I recently had my Maxtor die where it just couldnt boot past the bios. So i formated (and hard formatted) the second maxtor hdd and tried to load an OS and it had similar faults. So I thought I had 2 faulty HDD's. I ran diognositcs test from the official site and they both came up with errors whcih Maxtor informed me to hardformat. They both still failed.

So i bought a brand new WD and it seems to be doing a similar thing!!

What can my problem be? It seems that when the OS goes to use the HDD it crashes.

I have an LED on my mb which lights up if there are any errors on the board. It inidcates that everything is running smoothly.

IF anyone has any idea at all on what my problem could be or knows some decent diognostic tools to try and issolate the problem i'd love to hear.

Any more detail needed please let me know.

[Darthtanion]

Re: Hard drive problems, please help!

Drop the hard drive into another system and see if it can do a complete install of Windows. If so then you're in for some troubleshooting of your own box. If this ends up being the case, I'd check out IDE cables and motherboard first off. Otherwise you may be having the world's worst case of bad luck.

[RoadrunneR]

Re: Hard drive problems, please help!

I did put the WD hdd into another system and tried to boot it as a secondary, it shows up in the device manager and as an IDE controller when you boot but nothing shows in "my computer".

Does anyone know of any tools i can use to rtry and troubleshoot this?

I'm worried if i put another hdd into the computer it might ruin it, like it may have done to the past 3. I cant for the love of me think how though.

[Darthtanion]

Re: Hard drive problems, please help!

There are a couple of reasons this might have happened. First off, you tested the secondary drive in a Win9x machine but have your new drive formatted in NTFS. FDISK can help you solve this problem. Win9x cannot see NTFS partitions so will not assign a drive letter to that partition. Secondly, the formatting function may not have taken when you installed. If you're running a WinXP system to test out your hard drive, go into disk management an try to format your drive and see if it works then. After formatting it should assign it a drive letter.

[Rancid.One]