Hard Drive, bios or windows?

[kbtat2]

Hello everyone,
I'm having a strange problem and I can't figure it out so I thought I would break down and ask for help.

Here's my dilemma, Yesterday I tried to reboot, I heard the HD clicking and windows wouldn't load. It said something about hall.dll was missing. I tried again and it got into windows but it was really sluggish. I immediately thought it was the hard drive so I went out and got a new one, installed it and transfered the info from the old one. Tried to reboot and same thing. I finally figured out that if I unhooked my storage drive it would reboot fine. Both my boot drive and my storage drive are sata's and I have another storage drive that is regular ide.
Everything seemed fine until this morning I tried to reboot and it gave me aan error message that said "CMOS Checksum error Defaults loaded" and rebboted itself. I went back in and set all the bios settings to what I had them at and rebooted fine with the exception that I had to unhook my second sata DRIVE.

Once I get into windows I can hook my storage sata drive up and all is well.

I will continue to check this thread and if anymore info is needed I will give it.

Thanks for your help.

[Jon]

Sounds to me as though your storage SATA is the one that is going bad. Upon rebooting, is the second SATA drive being detected? If not, that would explain your CMOS being reset (hardware change).

Chkdsk the drive to see if it can find any errors. Chkdsk /f to automatically fix any errors, but this sounds along the lines of a hardware failure to me - worth a try if you have the time.

[kbtat2]

When I reboot and everything goes good the sata storage is being detected fine but like I said earlier sometimes it won't reboot unless I remove the sata storage cable. I did run chkdsk on it though and it said everything was fine.

[dmitryk]

Check disk will not find a problem if HDD is slowing down (retrying to read the sectors). You will need to run manufacture disk diagnostic and/or look at the drive SMART attributes to see if anything over the thresholds

[kbtat2]

Well, I have run the Hiatchi diagnostic tests and they all come back good and I used speedfan to check the S.M.A.R.T. attributes and they also come back good.
Is it possible that my MB is going bad? Aren't the drive controllers part of the motherboard?

[Xaotic]

Did you run the short test or the advanced version? The drive clicking is almost certainly a disk issue. Likely, the PCBA on the HDD has a component going bad. It may only be happening on power up, but will likely go bad very shortly. Back up the data first and then play some more diagnostics. Try a different SATA port for the storage drive, the problem should follow the drive rather than the port. It wouldn't be the first time I've seen intermittent issues. The DFT also has an excerciser function for stress testing the drive. You might want to run this for a longer interval and then recheck both the advanced test and SMART data.

Yes, the ATA controller is on the mainboard.

[kbtat2]

I already replaced the clicking hard drive because I know thats a sign of it going bad but even after I replaced it I'm still having problems at boot that seems related to the second sata drive being hooked up.

EDIT: Added more to post.