5th new hard drive

djshawn1984

i currently have a friend's dell pc to work on because it won't load the OS. Dell has sent out a tech to replace the hard drive 4 times already, all within the first few months. the last time they were out was about 6 months ago. He said a few days ago the pc locked up and now the BIOS says the hard drive is not present. Since its a SATA drive i dont have any known-good drives or cable to use to troubleshoot the drive,cable, or controller but im pretty sure its another bad hard drive. Does anyone have any thoughts on what would be juicing these drives, maybe the power supply? why did this one take a few months to go bad??? any thought would be appreciated. thank you.

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Comments

RussS

I would suggest to the Dell people that they replaced the PS and the motherboard too. Hard drives do not die that regularly unless something is taking them down.

/usr

I can't believe they actually replaced it 4 times.

It seems that after the second, MAYBE the third, you would start looking for other suspects.

Ricka182

I agree. Your friend should tell Dell to do something more than just a hard drive.

darkmagic

Well, i just have a couple of points:

---> The first thing might be the DELL people might be replacing the original hard disk with already used hard drives, which is quite improbable

---> The more probable thing is that the power supply to the comp is done using a 2-plug switch which has no "ground" component instead of a 3-plug switch with a "ground" component, that quite some times is the reason for the hard disks to go bad.

My 2 hard disks went down very quickly, before i discovered that this was the problem.

RussS

darkmagic wrote:

---> The more probable thing is that the power supply to the comp is done using a 2-plug switch which has no "ground" component instead of a 3-plug switch with a "ground" component, that quite some times is the reason for the hard disks to go bad.

That is exactly what I was thinking.

Ricka182

I thought all power cables were 3-pronged.......never seen a non-grounded power cable before....maybe on an older system......

TheShadow

No but people with old houses love to break of the ground prong believing it is useless or use one of those adapters and leave the green wire hanging in the air. However the real got ya is the use an isolation power strip and break off the ground prong to that. Every thing is then plugged into the power strip and ground loops are formed. Something with a heavy motor like a laser printer can then send nasty spikes to the other equipment. Many tech's miss it never assuming someone would do something that dumb. A simple 2 dollar LED circuit tester will spot it in two seconds.

Ricka182

Anyone who is dumb enough to "modify" an electrical cable deserves to get shocked, or lose the equipment. Dell would be dumb enough to send out two-pronged plugs I'm sure.......I hate disk failures.....

TeKniques

The only time I have seen a Dell come not as advertised was about 3 weeks ago. Got a new Dell at work and it had 2 CD-RW drives instead of 1.