newbie here with HD problem...(kinda long)

[e36_m3_4dr]

First of all, I just wanted to say "hi". I'm new to this forum so please excuse my ingnorance...

Anyways, here is my problem. I have a two hard drive. My primary HD is a ATA100 40G and my secondary is (was) ATA100 200G. First I partitioned my secondary drive to 3 partions (100G - 50G -50G...as so it seems). Everything worked fine for about a month, then all of a sudden as I turn on my PC one day at the startup it wants to run scandisk on my last partion saying something might be corrupted. It does this everything it boots up for a week (i let it run through the scan everytime..to be 'safe'). Then out of the blue I can't access that partition anymore. I tried to re-format that partion, which goes fine but only works for a day or two and then back to the same problem. Then just recently my second partion starts to get the scandisk error during boot up. I figured it might be a bad HD so a few days ago I went out and bought another ATA100 250G HD. This time when I went to partition it, it won't let me partition rather create a 'simple' drive. I figured it should work the same way so I created 4 'simple' drives and start copying my files over. no longer then a day later the last 'simple' drives starts giving me errors somet like 'cannot access files...file might be corrupted...'. I re-format again and create a new 'simple' drive...same thing happens when i copy files I know are NOT corrupted over. I got fed up with it so I went and exchange that HD for another ATA100 250G HD. I haven't put the new in yet. Does anybody know what might be going on?

[Cricket]

What's the complete system specs of your computer?

How old is it?

Which version of Windows are you using?

Have you scanned for viruses?

Have you tried another IDE cable yet?

Cricket

[e36_m3_4dr]

Thanks for replying. Here's a quick spec on my setup.

Mainboard: Supermicro P4DCE+, Dual Xeon 2GHz, Intel 860 Chipset, 512MB RIMM, Dual ATA/100 IDE Channels

Anyways here's an update: I put in my new 250G HD yesterday and WinXP picks it up as a volume and only allows me to create simple drives again. I decided to us WinXP at boot up to create 3 partitions. Log back into Windows and now they're setup as partitions and not as volume...reformatted them in NTFS and everything seems to be working fine now. hopefully the last drive won't get corrupted...again. thanks for listening to my rant.

[e36_m3_4dr]

okay it's me...again.
just when I thought I got it figured out the same problem appeared. This time I used Partition Magic 8 to partitioned my second HD...and again it get a continuous error message. You guys think i need to update my XP to SP2 first?

[glc]

No, but it has to be at least SP1.

[potassium19]

Have only seen this type of problem twice in 25 years, and more accurately 2 time in the last few months, my solution was to zero fill the drive on a good working system, they worked flawlessly afterwards, but then again they haven't proved the test of time yet. My guess was a boot sector virus, but won't know until it becomes a trend like the Britney Spears exe redialer (bought a house and a new car repairing 1000's of that one).