hard drive dying or duff CMOS baterry?

[Netguy]

Hi

My PC crashed today, as I restarted it, I got a hard disk boot failure error, I could'nt log in through safe mode or anything.I could'nt be arsed with the recovery console malarky so I reformatted the hard drive as I had all my stuff backed up anyway but as I restart it and go into the bios, windows does'nt recognise the hard drive? :S (western digtial 200gig SATA) the windows xp install I have is slipstreamed wth the SATA drivers which I'v reformatted plenty of times before. halfway through install, it just froze, i restarted, bio still dont recognise the hard drive.
I switched it off for a few minutes, this time the hard drive shows up in the bios screen :S wierd? Do you think the hard drive is dying or maybe a duff CMOS battery?
I'm having another go at installing Windows, so hope it all goes well.

Cheers

 

[Netguy]

Ok, I've managed to install windows ok, but as I restart it, I still freezes up, then have reboot few times.. I really hope this drive aint dying

 

[Skilldibop]

I hate to be the bearer of bad news but i seriously entertain the idea that it IS the drive dying as if it were CMOS or BIOS you'd get to the same place each time and you wouldn't get as far as OS install. It's either the drive OR the motherboards controller. I had a sparkle NF2 DOA that was like that, worked fine till i installed windows and it'd crash in setup. Turned out to be a DMA issue between the IDE controller and the memory somewhere. The drive still works fine. However that did lock up at the same point in XP setup every time so in your case i'd reckon the hard disk.

Check it with another disk before you bin anything tho.

 

[Netguy]

Everything seems to be running ok today, I did all the tests using the WD program, it passed the tests fine, Also the temps on the hard drive seem to stay at 39degrees constant, is that normal for a Western digital 200gig SATA?

I've got another Hard drive coming in a few days just incase.