Can Overclocking Damage Components?

[lee87]

I got some new components for my pc on tuesday
Asrock 939 Dual Motherboard
1GB Corsair Value Ram
Athlon X2 3800+

I had my cpu clocked at 2.5ghz and it was stable, yesterday I tried to clock it to 2.6ghz and it would keep freezing at the bios. I left it, later that day I came back and put the pc on but it would keep getting boot errors. The bios was set back to it's default settings. I then found out that my hard drive had died.

I have had the hard drive for 1 1/2 years with no problems until now. It was a IDE 80GB Maxtor.

I didn't think overclocking could break anything except the RAM or cpu.
Could overclocking cause my hard drive to break?

Thanks

 

[lee87]

What errors are you seeing ?
Could it just be a corrupt Windows installation?

It's definitely broke it's saying 'reboot and please select proper boot device or insert boot media into selected boot device and press a key to continue'. It says this straight after the bios screen. I tried to install windows but it does the same even if the dvd drive is the first boot device. If I unplug the hard drive it will load up the cd.

I tried an old 20gb HDD and it worked fine.

That's all you need to say. Maxtor are rubbish. Buy a quality drive.

I've used maxtor hard drives in 3 pc's that i've built and this is the first problem i've had with them.

I kept the pci frequency at the default speed when overclocking so that wouldn't have caused it.
Must have just been a coincidence that it broke straight after the overclock.
Just wanted to know if the overclock could cause it to break as I might have not overclocked again.

 

[lee87]

are you certain the 1st boot device is the right drive.

with that mobo if u switch it off/on a couple of times it resets the bois to all defaults.

Yes, I tried with the cd and floppy drive as the first boot devices and it still didn't work.

If I have the hard drive plugged in, I can't boot from any other drive (cd, floppy or other hard drive). It will come up with the same message.
I tried disabling raid and didn't make a difference.
I tried the hard drive in another pc and it doesn't work in that either.

Thanks for all the help anyway. I'm currently using a old 20GB hard drive for my gaming machine.

 

[lee87]

When I had the cpu clocked at 2.5ghz, the ram was also overclocked. I had ran a cpu test and memtest and this didn't show any errors. I had it set like this for 2 days.
When I tried to overclock to 2.6ghz, I put the ram on a divider. The pc would crash at the bios, so I turned the pc off and left it for 6 hours. Thats when the errors started happening and I didn't get a chance to do any testing.

 

[lee87]

The voltage was only at 1.4V. Thats the most my mobo will go to.
Didn't change the ram voltage.
I have checked the stepping and some people have been getting between 2.6ghz-2.8ghz with it.

I think it could just be a coincidence that it broke after the overclock.