Hi,

Iv had a few problems with my computer since I assembled it in 2006. At one point i was reinstalling windows every 2 weeks whilst trying to do my major uni project!

The problem is that the SATA hard disks start to do the click of death when loading data from them, this gets worse and worse until windows goes to blue screen saying it was shut down to protect itself. Normally at that point i take the bios battery out and swap where some of the pata cables are plugged in on the montherboard, wait 30 seconds and then it should work fine for the day, i keep repeating that process every day with it gradually getting worse until it will no longer boot up after hanging or going to blue screen, (normally it never gets passed where it detects the hdds when booting up or NTLDR will be mising or itll hang on the windows logo with loading bar) at this point i then reset the bios change the cabling again and reinstall windows and itll work fine for about 3 weeks then the whole process repeats.

Iv tried installing different versions of windows on different partitions, 3 different pata and sata hard disks and recently I replaced the motherboard which solved the problem for a while. Iv tried resetting the BIOS and CMOS to factory defaults which occasionally helps to get it to boot up if its hanging before loading windows. iv tried defraging, formatting, partitioning and chckdisk says there arent any bad sectors. One Sata HDD works in my friends computer but prevents my computer from ever booting up so ive completely given up on it, that disc does the click constantly every few seconds whereas the others do it randomly.

any ideads whats causing the problem?

If your drives are clicking then they are bad and should be replaced regardless of the rest of your computer.

If you find that your computer is killing drives you might need to look at getting a new power supply.

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