Disappearing hard drives.

[Anonymous]

Howdy doody, heres a brain tingler for you.

Computer needs reformat.
Insert XP op sys disc, restart computer, go through procedures, get reformatting, 7% CRASH.

Try again, get to 5% CRASH.

Get windows boot floppy to do a Dos format, Oh sh*t no hard drive in Bios.

Install another hard drive, as above CRASH.

Try again with Dos floppy and reformat to fat32 OK.

Start install, get to final stage and CRASH.

Go back to Dos floppy to reformat drive to find it's not there in the Bios.

Anybody any clues!

ASrocks K7S8X board, XP2800 proc, 512ddr, ASUS graphics card.

[Bail]

Hmm, that is a tricky one. By the sounds of it you could have killed various hard drives. Which may mean theres somethign else wrong with your PC causing the crashes (Overheating CPU?)

Try taking everything out of the PC apart from CPU, Ram, Graphics. Then flash the BIOS, and turn on. Then add a hard drive... if it survived you should see it, if not its dead.

In which case you may want to get a new PC, as by the sounds of it your system is crashing and therefor trashing every HD you put in.

[Big Brother]

... as by the sounds of it your system is crashing and therefor trashing every HD you put in.

I doubt that as the PC is relatively high spec and new sounding. Most Motherboards now come with an audible alarm when something's overheating and from what I just looked at this particular motherboard has some form of protection. i.e in my PC's case if it overheats there is a loud fire alarm sound blares out until I turn the PC off.

From my personal experience I have never once come accross any standard home or home office PC which suffers from something like this. The usual "My hard drive has failed" story is really just some small minor error which can be resolved by reformatting.

I have myself suffered such an incident, which was resolved.

Back on topic. As Bail suggested remove all 'non-essential' cards and drives. Just leave your Floppy, CD, Hard Disc & Graphics card if you have one.

Having not had to reformat in a long time I'm not clued up on how it goes anymore but have you deleted the partion then re-created it using fdisk. I only have an upgrade of XP so I tend to start from Win98/ME up to XP.

Another thing, have you tried scanning and defragging the drives before you go to format. Is the drive set to Master?

How "long" does it crash for? Are we talking it stays put on 5% for a few mins and you give up. Have you tried leaving it overnight or while you go to work or school etc?