Hard drive failure? Or simple bootup bug?

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blayez

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First off, let me take the time to explain the situation:

A couple of months back, I had a very strange problem happen to my computer out of the blue. One day when I went to turn it on, the computer would not get past loading the BIOS or even get to the boot menu screen. I did not do anything out of the ordinary the day before.

At the moment, I cannot remember the exact error it gave me, but it was something along the lines of something becoming corrupted within the hard drive, and windows was unable to boot up. It gave a specific error message (which I'm trying to look up). Hopefully, you guys might already have an idea for whats going on.

So, I am not very tech savy when it comes to problems like this.. and I was in desperate need of my computer for the next few weeks. I took my computer to a local computer shop to see what they could do, and they said that BOTH of my hard drives failed (I had them hooked up in RAID 0). I found this very odd seeing as how my computer was fairly new and I try my best to keep it clean both physically and the software clean and virus-free. My computer was no longer under warranty.

So I trusted there word and decided that I better order 2 new hard drives. I ordered the exact pair that I had used before to avoid any compatability issues and up to this point, I had no complaint about the performance what so ever. I am currently using (and did use) x2 160GB Samsung SATA 7200 RPM drives (model num: HD160JJ/p).

These drives cost me a pretty penny to replace, but I haven't forgotten about them. I have reason to doubt the reliability of the tests that the "local computer store" put my system through to see if the hard drive actually failed or if there was a simple bug or corruption that had happened in a windows file that would not let me load it up. They said that they tried the drives in another computer (as I requested) and they would not work there as well.

Now I have 4 drives (the 2 that I replaced are sitting right here beside me, and the other 2 are in my computer performing excellent as always). I really want to find out if these other 2 drives have really bit the dust or if they can be repaired I want to sell them to regain a bit of my money back.

I am still looking more into finding the error that my computer gave me. Please, if anyone has any suggestions about what I should do, let me know!

Any ideas? I am still trying to find the exact error message.
 
Was the error something like ntldr is corrupt or missing?


that can mean bad hdds.

what you can do to test them is download Download IBM - Hitachi Drive Fitness Test 4.13 - Quick, reliable method to test SCSI and IDE hard disk drives - Softpedia

burn the iso to a cd and boot off it with the hdd you want to test in the computer.

pick that hdd to test and that application will run thru some things testing read write mechanics etc. It will tell you if the drives indeed went bad.

If they pass the test that it just might have been some really bad software corruption.
 
I'm a bit afraid to take out the drives I have now and put in the corrupt ones. But I really need to find out if they are toast or not.

It gave me a specific error message, but ntldr does not sound familiar, and I am sure that corrupt or missing wasn't part of the error message. It would get to the black screen where I load up my BIOS and can press F2 to go to the system setup screen where I can adjust my chasis light color, etc. But then the screen would go black and it would give me the error message and would not let me get far enough to even reinstall windows on the drive.
 
Okay first, please do not bump your own topic within 24 hours. We will be by to answer it when we can.

2nd we will need to know the error code. Was it something like NTFS.sys missing or NTLDR missing?
 
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