Hello. I did not just buy this computer, or the Hard Drives. I've had them working time and time again. These are: one 2gig, and two 80gigs. One of the 80's did fail, about a year ago, and I placed it in a drawer. I continued to use the the other 80, as well as the 2. Until they stopped working, and by stopped working, I mean "DISK READ ERROR, INSERT SYSTEM DISK".

Strangly, I grabbed my broken 80gig and it booted up fine, had all my old files.

Unfortunately, this morning, I come back to see an error message, black screen white text. Also, unfortunately I don't remember what it said, I sort of turned off the computer right away and started it back up thinking/hoping "it's not broke".

Now for the twist.
I am using one of the 80 gigs right now, to post on this forum about it being broken. For some reason it works with a Ubuntu Live CD. So I am thinking, if it is writeable (ubuntu has to write some files to the HD, correct?), and Ubuntu even detects the 80gig, then the HD should still work? right?

Not sure. I try to Install ubuntu from the live CD, it starts, then says "encountered an error". Very vauge.

So all three drives should still work (except one), but it started working for a night.. Is this common? And how do I look deeper into this, can I run some diagnostics?

Hi Aquarius,

Wecome to PCHF!!

As far as I know, the Ubuntu Live CD runs in memory only and uses no swap file or anything (henceforth the CDROM access every time you want to do something.

If you have a Windows XP CD, insert it and boot to it, after you've agreed to the terms and whatnot, boot into the recovery console. When in the recovery console, type "chkdsk /r" (without quotes and please note the space before the slash). Let it do it's thing. Hopefully that will give some insight as to whether or not the disk is completely pooched or not, it may, in fact, be somewhat recoverable.

As for the other drives, try the same with them and see if any of them are recoverable using that tool. For the time being, make sure you only have one hard drive and your CDROM in the PC and make sure one is set to master and one is set to slave (if they're on the same IDE Cable, if they're SATA that shouldn't be a concern).