Some Hard Drive Questions

[reluttr]

I have been having trouble with a drive for some time "I actually asked about it in the past on here". Basically about last friday I noticed that my windows installation would just out of the blue go to crap. It would lock up and freeze for about a 5 minute interval, so I ran a CHKDSK on the drive at boot up and it found some "orphaned" files and attempted to repair the system. Well the system booted up one more time, then refused to boot again.

So into the installer DVD I go, it attempts a startup repair, and now when I boot windows goes directly into startup repair.

So off to Ubuntu Live via usb pen drive. I back up the drive then format it and reinstall windows. It still refuses to boot, this time it will hang at the bios command prompt just after "boot from disk drive".

So my initial thoughts was that the drive went bad, since its impossible to boot from it. So I totally unhook the drive, and attempt to install ubuntu to one of my IDE drives, just as a temporary solution untill I can order a new drive from newegg. Well then I notice that they wont boot either. So thinking it may be a Slave/Master setup, I unplug one drive and adjust the jumper.

Well it still refuses to boot, so I decided to try installing windows to it, so I pop in the windows installer dvd and it literally takes it like 15 minutes to get to the first dialog in the installer process, it takes even longer to get next window.

So now I am wondering if the problem isn't a deeper one that I initially thought. Because the IDE drives have always been part of the system, and the installer dvd didn't run poorly before I disconnected the malfunctioning Sata drive.

I did a memory test via the installer dvd prior to disconnecting the drive, and it passed, so it cant be the RAM. Could it seriously be the motherboard again? Also, is it possible for a cases front usb ports to short out a motherboard if they are slightly worn out?


Also, when choosing a new Hard Drive, which brands should I pig ear as "good", and which would be faster? 500gb at 7200 RPM or 1TB at 7200 RPM. Because that seems to be the two most popular affordable ones on newegg.

 

[Maguscreed]

There were several other steps you could have used before jumping to ubuntu which has probably destroyed the bootmgr by now.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/139576-startup-repair-infinite-loop-recovery.html

and it sounds like you had a file issue, not an actual startup issue to begin with, this would have been the proper fix for that.
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/139810-sfc-scannow-run-command-prompt-boot.html

...just for future reference.

 

[reluttr]

Yeah but my problem is that I formated and completely reinstalled windows 7 and it still would not boot.

Also to make sure, this probably is not a motherboard problem right?

 

[Maguscreed]

The windows 7 typical format does not actually wipe the drive.
Common misconception that I actually held too myself until recently.
For a true clean install you have to follow these instructions.
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/1649-clean-install-windows-7-a.html