I think a HDD might be dying? O.o

Soldato
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So as title, I think a hdd might be dying - but I don't know for sure. I'm running a Corsair Force 3 120GB, a WD Caviar Black, a Samsung Spinpoint, and a LaCie HDD.
Ok so, scenario time, I go to bed at night with everything working fine. Wake up, and it's rebooted and there's an error message. Usually NTLDR missing or Boot Device Inaccessable.
Try rebooting a few times and it gives whichever message it had before.
Unplug the 3 hdds (leaving the ssd attached), and it boots up fine. So, obviously I think it's a hdd dying - simple, right? Wrong.
I plug in the 3 hdds, and it boots up fine again. So I can't exactly test one at a time to find the problem drive, as it seems simply unplugging and replugging them "fixes" it.

So, Ideas?
 
It is a boot drive issue.
I suspect your PC is rebooting itself and trying to load the OS from the wrong drive, which is why removing the others lets you boot.
When you add the others, it has remembered the correct boot drive and so still works. Then there's a reboot and it forgets again.

There's a chance it's down to your overclock, I'd back it off and see if the problem goes away.

I am assuming the correct boot drive has been set in the BIOS? It may be worth checking it's still correct the next time you get the problem, there may be something funky going on.
 
It is a boot drive issue.
I suspect your PC is rebooting itself and trying to load the OS from the wrong drive, which is why removing the others lets you boot.
When you add the others, it has remembered the correct boot drive and so still works. Then there's a reboot and it forgets again.

There's a chance it's down to your overclock, I'd back it off and see if the problem goes away.

I am assuming the correct boot drive has been set in the BIOS? It may be worth checking it's still correct the next time you get the problem, there may be something funky going on.

Yeah, everything's set right in the bios. The SSD is the primary boot drive, the boot order has USB then CD then SSD then the HDDs.
As for the overclock, it's not saved in the bios - so the overclock only gets applied once I'm in windows, so I think we can safely assume that's not the issue.

Now I think about it though, there must be a boot record on one of the other drives, as sometimes it comes up asking which OS to boot (win 7 or vista), and I've not run vista for years - it's not even seen this SSD. I can't even remember which hdd it was originally on, it's been formatted since but I guess the boot record is still there and maybe confusing the PC on boot? Any ideas on that?
 
I'd try booting from each HD and see what they report.

I would not rule out the overclock at all, it may be what's causing the PC to reboot while you're asleep and upsetting the mobo in some way. This might all be solved simply by getting the system stable.
 
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