hard drive

My pc would not boot up, I have made no software or hardware changes.
The bios or fdisk would not recognise the drive and I could not hear the hard drive starting up.
I borrowed my fathers PC for testing. My fathers PC will also not recognise my hard drive and again I can not hear the hard drive spinning.
I thought I would test my fathers hard drive in my pc. The pc booted up but halfway through starting windows (I did get the windows start up splash screen for about 10 - 15 seconds) I got a blue screen.
The blue screen said it found a problem with my PC and would shut down the PC to prevent damage. It told me if I had added new software or hardware I should remove it to see if that solves the problem. As I have said previously I have made no changes to my pc.

What coud cause my hard drive to die? Is it possible to short out a hard drive?

My bios reports no errors and I have tried reseting defaults.

Why when I add my fathers hard drive to my pc it stops halfway through booting up and gives me the blue screen saying it has found a fault? (If I put my fathers hard drive back in his pc it works ok).

My bios recognises the CPU, memory, cpu fan, dvd drive etc and reports no errors.

 

I would venture a guess that if you can't hear your hard drive spin up and it will not work or be recognized in two different computers, then it is dead.

Your fathers hard drive will have hardware configurations that are specific to his particular computer. When you try to install it in yours, on boot, it will find your hardware that is installed and the two different configurations will cause conflicts.

Why did your HD fail ?? It can be many reasons......very hard to tell. Sometimes they are DOA right out the box.

Debe

 

I agree with Bird completly. Your HDD is bad for sure. Your fathers HDD does have different configurations and that's why you got the blue screen. I would definatly buy a new HDD and start with a fresh install of Windows XP, or your choice, and would not do a hard drive copy from one to the other. (Files are ok, like MP3's and stuff, but don't move an operating system from one HDD to another). Working with computers for many years I have seen many different and crazy things, and to answer your question, YES HDDs do go bad and it can be anything from a power surge, even if you have a surge protector, to just a plain bad manufactured HDD. Hope this helps!