2 Hard Drives dying at the same time?

The 2 hard drives I have in my main rig are both Western Digitals -- a 2 year old 80GB main drive that host my main windows partition, an applications partition, and a data partition, and a 120GB secondary drive which had a couple GB of data and little else. The 120GB is acutually a replacement from an RMA about 5 or 6 months ago.

I came home from work the other day to find the pc had frozen. After rebooting a few times and having freeze up again, usually while loading at the windows xp boot screen, windows eventually ran a disk check and found 4 bad sectors which were (supposedly) repaired. However I could still not get windows up for more than a few minutes (if at all) before it would freeze up. I also ran the Western Digital diagnostic tool and the first time it found an error and fixed, and then subesequently would not find any errors. The lock ups however continued. Also I was hearing so rather loud clicking noises.

Now in an attempt to salvage as much data as possible I stuck the drive in the fridge and was then able to download stuff of it for over an hour without any problems.

So at this point I’m still convinced it’s the 80GB hard drive simply dying after 2 years of faithful service. So I go to install Windows XP on the 120GB drive…and it freezes up about 5 minutes in to the process (the other hard drive is no longer in the computer). I ran the WD diagnostic on this drive and it detected no problems. I tried to install Windows again, and again it froze up during partitioning. It was at this point that I discovered the clicking noises I was hearing before were actually from this drive, not the 80GB one (though I suppose it could have been from both). I put my ear up to it after it froze and it was clicking an whirring pretty badly. (btw I had previously put this drive in a different computer and backed up the couple gigs of data on it – it worked fine, though it did seem a bit slow).

So now I’m unfortunately filled with doubt as to where exactly the problem lies. Could it be that both of my drives began dying at the same time? Is it possible that another component in my system caused there death? The only other thing I can think of to check at this time is the RAM, which I’m going to swap out after work tonight. Other than that….

A little more info: I’m pretty sure temperature was not a problem, my overclock had been for quite some time simply upping the multiplier from 11x to 12x (now back to stock). System specs: AMD2500, A7N8X, 430 Antec psu, 512MB RAM, Ati 9700pro.

Unless you had some voltage spikes or something like that, your just a cowincidence that both are failing at the same time. I've had it happen but thankfully I noticed it was going bad and got all the files of the drive before fully dying on me, and was able to replace the drive before my other one started doing it.

If u got a volt meter maybe try checking the voltages coming off the PSU and make sure its withing spec. Other then that, get the RMA ready for the drives ASAP and limit use on the computer if you can't get the files onto another media. Wait til the new drives come and copy the drives off to the new oens. Then format if possible and send the drives back to the company.

It is possible, although statistically not all that likely, that two drives died at the same time. However, this may be due to a fault in your PC rather than the drives being faulty at the start. How are the PSU rails? Were there any power surges? Anything else that may have caused damage? Was the PC kicked or dropped, or the drives dropped?

EDIT: Beaten

Thankfully I was able to get everything important off of both drives.

Hopefully I can get in and check my MBM5 logs to see if there were any spikes. There was in fact a fan that had seized up -- would that be enough to cause a spike?

(And no, the pc had not been dropped, kicked, nor been subjected to any other blunt trauma, and should be sufficiently protected from external surges.)

One other thing to consider... Were both drives on the same IDE chain at the time they were both in the system?

Have you determinded (without a doubt) that your 80GB is bad. The 120GB most definately sounds bad but if your 120GB and your 80B were on the same IDE channel, then if one locks up, the whole system appears frozen. I have also seen situations where if the drives are on separate chains that one going bad will freeze the entire system....especially on boot.

Do some more tests on the 80GB, it might be fine.

Foxy

Labotomy Jack, I think that in this case what you really need to do is isolate the problem. For this I'd test the 120Gb drive in another machine, and try to do some stress test for a couple of hours. If it fails, the drive is faulty. If not, then it is time to blame your system.

Regards

They were originally both on the same IDE channel, however the problems continued to manfiest even when each drive was installed seperately in the machine. It does look like I am going to need to do a bit more testing before I go and pick up a shiny new Seagate.

Thanks everyone for the replies.