Very strange HD - PC problem

[deniro24]

Strange problem, please help!

My system specs are:

AMD Athlon 64 2800
DFI Lan Party UT nF3 250gb
Sapphire 9600 XT
3 Sticks of 512 DDR400 Samsung RAM
Cooler Master 350W power supply
Windows XP SP2

200GB Western Digital SATA (current victim)

200GB Maxtor SATA (past victim )

OK, so I built this PC myself about a year ago and it has run smooth with no problems up until a few months ago. I was running the above system with the Maxtor as my main Windows drive and the WD as a data/back up drive. My PC began to randomly freeze (during games, online, working with ms office, I could not find a pattern) and I was forced to reboot. After a few days of this I turned my PC on to find the HD corrupted, after the boot up screen I reciebed the "disk boot failure, insert system disk and press enter". I took the HD to a friends and dropped it in his PC and Windows read the disk as empty and unformatted. I re-installed Windows on the WD HD and was able to recover all of my data using a file recovery program. Thinking it was a HD problem, I removed the Maxtor from my system and continued to run with the single WD HD.

FF to now - The PC has been running fine AGAIN with no problems up until a few days ago = same problem, random freezing forcing me to reboot. This time I ran memtest and a bunch of other system utilities and found no problems with the hardware. Finally tonight, the PC has given me the disk boot failure message again and I'm guessing the HD is corrupted once again. For the life of me I cannot figure this one out.

Again, any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

[DaPunnisher]

Sounds like you have some type of malicious code running on your system. From what you explained it seems as though your backup files are infected also.

Make sure you do a complete and through virus and spyware scan. Let me know if this helps.

 

[shdwsclan]

I'm not suprised that WDs and Maxtors. They use th same technology.
I've actually had mechanical problems on numerous occasions with the maxtors and WDs that is why I just said no more and paid the extra money for a seagate.

Did you have S.M.A.R.T. monitoring enabled ?
First run the diagnostic software(from each manufacturer's web site) on your trouble disk. If it is mechanical, then you may be out of luck and recovery may become problematic if you dont know how badly damaged it is. If it is a file structure problem then try running chkdsk because it could just be the $mft. For $mft problems, it can span from a minor problem which can be fixed with chkdsk or partition disk doctor...to something more sever which probably will need winternals ERD commander.

 

[deniro24]

Thanks for the replies.

I thought it may be a virus or malicious code, however I scan my drives almost daily, I doubt this is the problem. Also, would a virus and such survive several formats?

I will run the diagnostic as soon as I get the PC running agin, but as I said the drives are not dead they just seem to lose data, and I can recover everything using recover my files or a similar program. I was wondering if it could possibly be a MB / Driver issue?

I will reply later once I scan the drives.

 

[deniro24]

The WD disk checked out fine, ran the extended lifeguard diagnostic and it passed. Also, no viruses.

The Maxtor is a write off, I suspect there is a mechanical problem there.

No idea what this problem is, although I'm looking at getting another HD and I will look into a Seagate.