Things you see at 4:00 am

Like many of my friends I work nights and thus I have the misfortune of being awake for a lot more hours than most people and get time to think and write accodingly. These are just reflections on the curent state of everything I have an opinion about.

Saturday, May 27, 2006

3 hard drives in a year

Tomorrow I have to go buy the third hard drive for my computer in about a year. For some reason the boot sector keeps going bad can anyone explain what might keep causing this problem so I know what to do to avoid it?

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

First, buy a Seagate drive to replace it. Seagate has a 5 year warranty on their drives and are the most reliable.

Second, check your power supply, it might be spiking too much and sending surges through your components.

Third, be sure there is plenty of space around the hard drive, they get very hot now, and that heat can damage the drives.

Fourth, check your motherboard, a bad controller can cause damage to the system as well.

10:19 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

What do you mean the 'boot sector goes bad'?

If it gets corrupt, you can usually reformat and go on again. Think fdisk /mbr in the windows realm...

Getting corrupted might be caused by any of the things Jack said, or also getting a virus or trojan.

5:41 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Ditto on the Seagate.

Were there issues before the drive died like losing programs or data? Did your browser or mail crash a lot? That might mean bad RAM, which can corrupt everything it touches - www.memtest.org is freeware RAM test software that can find bad memory using a bootable floppy. Give it a shot.

And since you didn't mention what OS you have - if you're somehow still running Windows ME, for the love of God STOP!

(Man, if only *I* had taken that advice years ago...)

10:57 PM  

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