Repeated HDD Failures

In light of the limited info you provided, here's what I'd suggest;

Assuming you've already checked things like power connectors (firm? tightly seated? enough power going thru?) Replaced the data cable, checked the bios, checked for irq or i/o conflicts, then my guess is the controller for the hard disk.

If its on the mobo, then you're sol. Time to pony up for another, however, if that is the solution, see this as as opportunity to upgrade to a better mobo and processor.

Good luck.

try using a different ribbon cable.

If you are loosing harddrives at a rate of three in a year, only two things will cause it. The first one is heat. Add cooling fans to your box. make sure that there is plenty of airflow around the drives. Global has an excellant harddrive cooler. If this is not the problem, the next major cause is low drive voltage or high drive voltage. The voltages should be + or - 1% of either 12 or 5. inother words + or - 11.88 to 12.12 or + or - 4.95 to 5.05. Any less causes the drive to drag on spinup and any more causes more heat than necessary.

Hope this helps you out!

In my experience heat is definitely the number one killer of hard drives.
The second one is shock/vibration.
I put bad power supplies third.
The first thing to check is the airflow pattern in the case. Some cases have no airflow over the HD. An Aux fan is necessary in these cases.
Regards, Chris

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:
The error message I get on booting is "Invalid system disk. Replace the disk and then press any key."
I put the last drive that failed into a Win2K PC (that boots to SCSI) as the Master Drive on IDE1 and upon booting that machine was able to access all the data on the new "D" drive on this machine. I then ran the Win2K error checking tools but they found nothing. I put the drive back in the original PC with a new cable and on boot I get "Invalid system disk. Replace the disk and then press any key."

Wow,
This is a completely different problem.
The Hard disks are not paperweights. They just have a problem with the partition table or Track 0 Sector 0. (The boot sector)

The most common cause of this problem is a virus.
So, scan the hard diskfor viruses, before you check the partition table. (Most, 70% , of the viruses are boot sector viruses.)
There are more causes for this problem, but they are rare, so do these two checks first.

And yes, the error message from Windows is the sameno matter which boot device (Floppy, HD, CD-ROM, LS120, SCSI, etc.) does not have the system files installed, or they are unaccessable.
Regards, Chris

I apologize for not providing enough information. The error message I received on booting this last time was "Invalid system disk. Replace the disk and then press any key", the same error as a non-bootable floppy left in the floppy drive, but therewas no floppy in the PC. The data was accessible when I moved the disk to a Win2K machine. I copied some important files then tried to fix the disk by replacing the system files (see Microsoft KB article Q128730) but ended up having to FDISK /MBR and reinstall Windows 98. I'm guessing it was a bootsector virus and the infected floppy is owned by this user.

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