Hard Drive problems.

[Jonathong]

Hi there,

Over the past few months my computer has been crashing from time to time with no explanation, just a sudden freeze. If I'm listening to music or playing a game the sound will drag out really slowly and repeat itself when the PC freezes. Nothing will respond even after 5 minutes so I usually just reboot.
The crashes have been happening more and more frequently recently and it's gotten to the point where I can only boot up into windows if I'm lucky, otherwise I get "BOOTMGR IS MISSING" or "A Disk Read Error Occurred, press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart" in which case I can only boot after leaving my PC off for a good 10 minutes or so otherwise the messages are repeated.
If and when I finally get to my windows Desktop, I can load up firefox for example, but eventually it will crash, then explorer.exe will crash and nothing will work.
My original thoughts were that my hard drive was obviously broken so I reinstalled Windows 7 on a different hard drive but the problem is still the same, is it strange that I would have the same problem on 2 different HDD'S?

Any advice will be greatly appreciated,

Regards,
Jonathong.

[CWH]

Hi,
It could be your Power Supply is failing on one or more of it's outputs, or it could be that the machine overheating.
How old is the machine and is it dust free?

Colin

[andrewuk]

Perhaps a dodgy HD controller? Are you using the built in one on your mobo, or a expansion card?