Hard Drive Bad Sectors

Typical! I get my PC configured and set up exactly how I like it, and then my 1 year old hard drive conks out on me!

I did a CHKDSK and it had some bad sectors and plenty of file corruption. Ran the Hitachi DFT software and it seemed to think it has rescued it, but I'm using another drive now just in case.

Luckily I could still access my e-mails when I accessed the drive from another system, and everything else is backed up via Acronis. Phew

Just a timely reminder to backup your system if you haven't for a while

Where I worked, IT was supposed to back up our data weekly. The system crashed we lost data and learned they hadn't bothered to back up our files for months. Heck of a fight to see who paid the overtime to re-enter the data.

Sunday morning is when I back up my files. It doesn't take long and most of it happens while I drink coffee and surf the web.

Vista is up and running now, but it sure does take some time to patch itself! I've not slipstreamed my Vista CD, so it's taken 2 hours for Windows Update to get all the patches re-installed

Same here, I copy the important stuff to a USB stick manually and then run Acronis to make sure I've got everything backed up.

A few years ago I paid the price for not having regular backups, so I make sure I do it all the time now

And the old drive I used to replace this drive with has now failed! I'm going to get a new one tomorrow (500GB Seagate Barracuda) and check for anything else that might cause the drives to fail. I think it's just a bad co-incidence, but I'll check case temps and try running it from a different SATA controller just in case.

have you ran chkdsk again, sounds newbie i know, but the simplest of things works. make sure you run chkdsk /r to repair it.
Another thing you can try is sfc /scannow. will find and attempt anything wrong. you run both of these in the run box.

I know this sounds stupid but I was having trouble with a drive - When I deleted the partition several times it finally corrected itself - funny thing though it didnt help until I changed the partition size

How old was this other drive? Were these drives in your overclocked system? If so, I'd be curious to know if you locked your PCIe frequency to 100 in your BIOS...

Use this tool to check what your PCIe frequency is currently set to: http://files.extremeoverclocking.com/file.php?f=189

If this setting gets to high it can lead to hard drive data corruption since these use the PCIe bus. When overclocking it's recommended to lock this setting to its default of 100, don't use the AUTO setting. I agree that it's a bit much of a coincidence, so this is one guess anyway.

Yep, PCIe is locked to 100 - that was my first worry too as it seems very co-indicental that two drives have failed so quickly (although they've run great for 1.5 years). I did download that tool just to double check though, thanks (edit: might need to try a new tool actually as I don't think this can read the PCIe properly on my chipset ICS9LPRS918BKL)

Got the new drive up and running with Windows 7 now

Went for a 640GB Western Digital drive as I've heard good things about this model (WD6400AAKS).

Did you install it as a slave, or did you actually install W7 onto it.
I hate the fact that everytime you install you have to set it up the way you want, but i do love the transfer wizard