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Hard Drives Crashing

I have a pc on the blink. It's got 2 HDDs; one 40GB, and one 120GB. The 40GB has 2 partitions, one of which holds the OS (WiN XP).

The pc will not boot... looks like the 40GB drive has died on me.

Here is my question:

What are the possible causes for my HDDs to fail (as this is not the first)?

Bad power supply? Chipset bad, etc?

I am either going to rebuild this pc (upgrade implied), or spend 1K on a dell b/c my wife is super pissed that her files (MBA School) are gone.

I am aware of RAID (data redundancy) but not on the up and up with it.

I'd appreciate some thoughts.

Thanks,

-B.

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maramom

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PCBONEZ

maramom is right. Don't write-off that drive so fast it may be recoverable.

RAID.
You -STILL- need to do frequent backups even if you have a raid setup.
The raid will protect you from -hardware failure- but that's it.
If Windows itself gets screwed up (say you get a nasty VIRUS),, raid will just ensure you have two copies of it.

PCBONEZ
.

nobus

there were a lot of bad drives , what brand is it ? maxtor?
for recovery first rule : stop using the drive.
setup a working PC with XP, install the recovery soft, then connect this drive as slave and try to recover.
if the drive is not seen in the bios, your chances for recovery are low.
However, as said, if you got no errors from the drive, you can usually repair the OS with a repair install :

http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/
you can use any of these for testing the drive : (don't select write stests) :

http://www.disk-utility.com/hard-disk-low-level-format.html