CPU change killed my hard drive

Loque

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Loque

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Anyone ever heard of this before?

Western Digital 160gb, sat in my computer for ages as basically a spare drive to stick stuff when i occasionally format etc...

I just changed my CPU from an i7 920 C0, to a D0, and upon booting up my computer, it would hang at the Windows loading screen.

After much trial and error, i figured out my windows installation had become corrupt in some way shape or form, and attempting to reinstall Windows would produce the same thing. (hang at loading screen)

I finally figured out that disconnecting this WD drive, seemed to fix the problem, and I was able to reinstall Windows. Everything was fine.

Now I tried to put this drive into another computer, and I ran HDTune on it, and to my astonishment, it is absolutely riddled with bad sectors, and a full scan will only get about 25% complete before it just refuses to continue.

So lesson of the day: Don't upgrade your CPU! You may kill your hard drive! :P
 
Agh, but everybody knows that you should disconnect any unnecessary drives etc. when doing a major hardware change.
 
I didn't think a minor CPU change would kill one of my hard drives. Especially considering I had reset my bios to defaults before I did the change. Tbh, If it had to kill one of my drives, im glad it was a single 160gb, and not one of my RAID0 drives. I would have cried.
 
well when its the same CPU essencially, just a different stepping. I would say its a relatively minor change. I would have thought that its certainly not enough to potentially kill a hard drive.
 
I don't think a cpu change would cause this.... You could have powered it off in a way that the head wasn't docked and you started moving the box around and scraped the heads on the platters :rolleyes:
 
Thejay said:
I don't think a cpu change would cause this.... You could have powered it off in a way that the head wasn't docked and you started moving the box around and scraped the heads on the platters :rolleyes:
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this is possible i guess, but I shut my computer down like I would any other time, so im not sure why the head wouldn't have been docked...
 
Could have been bad luck that it didn't dock? Or maybe something had gone faulty with the drive and head had stopped docking properly and moving the box around finished it off :(

*EDIT* If you want a really screwed HDD my parents pc had slowed to a crawl, couldn't figure out why until I ran HD Tach on it and got an amazing 4mb/sec transfer speed lol
 
The lesson of the day should be: disconnect everything when you upgrade something major. Like your CPU. Given that you are messing around with the motherboard, it would be wise to unplug everything from it, and make sure the power is disconnected etc.

The CPU change isn't what killed your CPU. It was more than likely something you did whilst changing the CPU.
 
As you stated it was riddled with bad sectors already but you didnt know about it until you scanned after. The boot sector possibly coincidently turned bad at the time of the upgrade making you think it was the cpu when really the whole drive is probably degrading randomly. Anyhoo hard drives fail, I had two hard drives fail simply moving my computer to a mates house for a lanparty. I put the tower on the back seat with a seat belt round it and got to other house 10 minutes later and turned it on to find both drives totally dead to the point the system hangs if they were plugged into the data line.
 
Ditto that the CPU change in itself has nothing to do with inflicting bad sectors on a hard drive.

How often do you reboot? The bad sectors in the boot sector could have been there for days, and just gone unnoticed until the next time you tried to boot (after the upgrade).
 
this drive was not my Windows drive btw, this was just a spare, unused drive I had purely for backup.
 
I recon it was very bad timing.

The other thing is you may of got it with static. Highly unlikely but theres a first time for everything.
 
Best thing to do is install an app that monitors S.M.A.R.T. readings so rather than it being turned on in the bios and getting no warnings about a drive dying you'll know about it lol :D
 
matthab said:
I recon it was very bad timing.

The other thing is you may of got it with static. Highly unlikely but theres a first time for everything.
Click to expand...

+1



The drive was probably bad in 1st place and was on the way out.. Changing CPU does not kill drives geeze... I would be spending half my life unplugging drives with pc and server updates if that was the case... Was just bad luck mate and the drive was faulty or a bad cable, worth trying another cable and low level formatting it again to see if you could use it again but make sure to keep an eye on it and if it keeps creating bad sectors bin it or RMA it if still under warranty.. Not worth the headaches bad drives create to keep it in the system if it's slowly dying on you. The worst devices in my book that give so many different errors and random errors are a bad drive or a slowly dying motherboard..
 
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Me neither :P

IF anything you're more likely to break stuff faffing around, trying to unplug it all, than if you just went in did what was needed and came back out quickly.
 
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