Hard drives continually lose MBR and partitioning information

Hello!
I have had an absolute nightmare with my hard drives failing over the
past couple of days. First off, I have four drives, a 40GB, a 80GB, a
120GB and a 250GB. About a week ago, my 40GB (which has XP on it)
suddenly wouldn't boot. The windows logo would appear, then the BSOD
would show up, then the computer would restart. I tried booting off the
XP cd, but my default CD-ROM drive wouldn't get recognized by the BIOS
properly. It would should up as a seemingly random string of special
characters and numbers. After fighting to repair the installation of
Windows and using a different CD drive, I was finally successful. The
40GB drive is a little slower than the rest, so I wanted to partition
the 120GB, and put Windows on the first partition. I did have some data
on the 120GB already, but I knew that Partition Magic could resize
without data loss. After PM resized it, I rebooted, and sure enough the
new partition was there, but all my data that was on the drive before
was gone. I figured I had just partitioned it incorrectly (even though
I doubled checked my settings, it was late and I wasn't 100% awake).
Regardless, I proceeded to load windows on that partition. Before the
installation, I unhooked all the drives I wouldn't need, just to be
safe. After windows was done, I hooked them back up, booted the
machine, and checked the drives. Annoyingly enough, one of my other
data drives (with a good portion of data I need) was now empty, and
said "Disk is not formatted, would you like to format now?" every time
I clicked on it. I decided to try a different IDE cable, but when I
rebooted, Windows gave me the BSOD and would not load.

I am completely confused by this, as I've never had this much trouble
with drives or partitioning before. Does this sound like a MOBO
problem, or maybe power supply? I don't want to go out an buy a bunch
of parts hoping I replace whatever one is causing the problem, but I
can't think of an easy way to test what it might be without damaging my
drives even more.

Any advice is greatly appreciated!

Derek,

Just went thru a similar experience on a family members computer. Never did
identify exactly which worm it was but they got hit with one of them. I
tried all the usual recovery tricks but could not get it to boot. Finally
just installed WinXP in another directory so I could salvage their files and
pics (not everyone backs up as they should...). Put that off to my NAS (and
isolated it) and ran several AV's against it and the one from CA nailed it
and deleted the email it was packaged in.

Rebuilt the system from scratch, ran diags overnight to insure the hardware
was okay and patted it on the fan and sent it out the door. Could be you
got one of the recent worms or Trojan horses.

Bob S.


wrote in message
ups.com...
Hello!
I have had an absolute nightmare with my hard drives failing over the
past couple of days. First off, I have four drives, a 40GB, a 80GB, a
120GB and a 250GB. About a week ago, my 40GB (which has XP on it)
suddenly wouldn't boot. The windows logo would appear, then the BSOD
would show up, then the computer would restart. I tried booting off the
XP cd, but my default CD-ROM drive wouldn't get recognized by the BIOS
properly. It would should up as a seemingly random string of special
characters and numbers. After fighting to repair the installation of
Windows and using a different CD drive, I was finally successful. The
40GB drive is a little slower than the rest, so I wanted to partition
the 120GB, and put Windows on the first partition. I did have some data
on the 120GB already, but I knew that Partition Magic could resize
without data loss. After PM resized it, I rebooted, and sure enough the
new partition was there, but all my data that was on the drive before
was gone. I figured I had just partitioned it incorrectly (even though
I doubled checked my settings, it was late and I wasn't 100% awake).
Regardless, I proceeded to load windows on that partition. Before the
installation, I unhooked all the drives I wouldn't need, just to be
safe. After windows was done, I hooked them back up, booted the
machine, and checked the drives. Annoyingly enough, one of my other
data drives (with a good portion of data I need) was now empty, and
said "Disk is not formatted, would you like to format now?" every time
I clicked on it. I decided to try a different IDE cable, but when I
rebooted, Windows gave me the BSOD and would not load.

I am completely confused by this, as I've never had this much trouble
with drives or partitioning before. Does this sound like a MOBO
problem, or maybe power supply? I don't want to go out an buy a bunch
of parts hoping I replace whatever one is causing the problem, but I
can't think of an easy way to test what it might be without damaging my
drives even more.

Any advice is greatly appreciated!