Hello

I bought a new computer less than 3 months ago and it has been running flawlessly since then, no problems, no hick-ups or anything. Two days ago though I had just finished a session of World of Warcraft and the computer was left standing in windows mode for about 30 minutes. When I went back to the computer the cursor and the entire system had frozen and it only responded to the reset button on the case. In the boot sequence that followed the computer could not detect my hard drive and tried to boot from the onboard network card on my motherboard. I then turned the computer off, checked the cables (which were in order) turned it back on and it worked just like before. The problem is that it has happened twice since then and I am worried that the hard drive is damaged... When I access the bios after a re-boot following a crash the hard drive does not appear.

Is this a hardware or software problem, should I format the drive and re-install (if there is a problem with the file system, but I really don't want to do this)...?

My setup: Gigabyte ATX nF4 s939 AMD PCIe SLI GLAN, CODEGEN ATX PSU 400W, 2x 1 GB DDR Memory PC3200, MSI GF6600 512Mb PCIe DVI HDTV GDDR2, DIAMONDMAX10 250 GB SATAII3G 7200RPM 16mb, AMD ATHLON 64 X2 3800+, NEC ND-3550 DVD-RW 16X, Samsung SFD-LHS1 3.5" Floppy.

Run a check disk scan on your computer to make sure there are no bad sectors. You can do this by typing chkdsk c: in a command prompt (Start -> Run -> cmd). This will then tell you that it needs to restart, it will restart and when booting into windows, it will give you a new screen and commence scanning. This will report if there's any bad sectors on your hard drive. If there is - your hard drive will need to be replaced. If there isn't, it still sounds like your hard drive will need to be replaced.

If Windows wasn't installed on this drive, you would be able to continue using windows, and the drive would show up in My Computer, but you won't be able to access any of the files on it. I've got a similar problem with one of my hard drives. So I've stopped using it until I can get a replacement.

I understand that this hard drive is new, but they are the most volatile piece of a computer. A small bump can cause so much damage. As it is new, you will be able to get it under warranty, but I suggest trying to get perhaps a store credit, and getting a Western Digital or Seagate drive, as these 2 brands are some of the better brands you can get.

Hi

Thanks for posting a reply to my post.

My hard drive is partioned in two parts, c: and d:, with windows (windows xp sp2) installed on c:. I ran chkdsk on both partions (did not get a message to re-boot though) and there was no bad sectors found.

Check out this website. It gives you a little application supplied by Maxtor to diagnose your hard disk better then Windows check disk. It might give you a better idea of where the problem lies. If this comes back fine, then I'll second your thought to try a format.

http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/Ma...&downloadID=22