Hardware

Ask something
Discussion Locked

Harddrive failure

0 helpful
4 replies

by jeewan3

Closed to new repliesThis discussion is closed. It stays readable, but it takes no new replies.
Something is causing my harddrive to fail. I have changed the harddrive three times on the same computer, after formatting and loading the OS it works fine for ~3 hours then the harddrive fails and will not be seen as a drive in the BIOS. My computer is located in a place free of any electromagnet fields or magnetic field. A second computer works fine in the same place.

4 replies

by maxwell edison

What causes a hard drive to fail?

Age - hard drives just grow old and die.

Power failures and power spikes. Most of the time, your hard drive survives these power problems, other times they don't.

Viruses can make your hard drive unreadable, or they can corrupt the data so it is unusable.

Physical damage. If you drop a hard drive (or the computer it is installed in) you can render the hard drive inoperable. Sometimes just sliding the system across the desk while the system is oncan cause severe hard drive problems.

Defects in the hard drive - as with anything, hardware failures happen.

---------

If you have different drives fail in the same machine, I would surmise that the reason would be a power spike issue or a virus that resides in the BIOS.

Maxwell

by maxwell edison

What OS are you loading? If there's a floppy disk associated with the install process, check that floppy disk for a boot sector virus. You may be transferring it each time you install.

Maxwell

This discussion is closed to new replies.