Boot Disk Failure

New system up and running for a week or so, but then got Boot Disk Failure. I left it a day and then it was working.

Then it happened again. Bios detects the drive ok, so i formatted and reinstalled windows. It was running ok through a few restarts as i installed drivers, but then on a full shut down/start up the message is back! I tried fixboot but no joy.

What to do - is the drive dead, or am i just unlucky with my boot sector.

Any ideas would be most appreciated.


Update:
still no joy. I reformatted, reinstalled and was up and running.

2 reboots - OK and 2 full power down and restarts later and it's gone again.

My set up is as below...

dodgy cable? dodgy onboard controller?
checked it using western digital's disk check application (from their website)?
checked it using a s.m.a.r.t. checker such as hddhealth?

sounds like a corrupt boot sector, have u scanned it for bad sectors and health? or rven low level formatted?

The drive is detected and I can reformat and install, so the connection is fine. I've ran the 2 apps above and they did not throw anything up.

I have scanned for drive errors and run a low level format. This again reported no errors.

Is there any quick way to restore the boot sector. At the moment I have to format the whole drive and reinstall Win XP? Rather time consuming when trying to troubleshoot!

I've seen that adding in my slave IDE drive always trips it to not boot. So I ran the DataLifeguard util and in the drive displays it came up with:

WD800JB
80gb dynamic drive

WD360GD
80gb dynamic drive

WD360GD
36gb ntfs

So it has put WD360GD in twice - mislabelling my 80gb slave drive!

I ran the drive info on what was being seen as the WD360GD 80gb dynamic drive, and I just got screens of repeated scrolling error code and had to reboot.

So why would my 80gb IDE slave drive be coming up as another WD360GD?

Any thoughts on this are most appreciated.

When I do an install with the IDE drive connected I am unable to install to my SATA Raptor, it goes on about partitions and being unable to load the file type on to my selected (sata raptor) drive.

With the IDE unplugged I can install but it gives me the option to format the Raptor in NTFS format - which I do.