Caviar Blue PATA Drive MBR failures?

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

I have two 160GB and one 320GB drive. The first I bought direct from Dell to upgrade the original drive from  80GB in my Inspiron 9300. It worked for around six months and appeared to fail. I requested a warranty replacement from WD and the same thing happened. I got the third and it happened yet again. The original drive is over seven years old and going strong.

The computer recognizes the drives but will not boot from them. In an external housing I can access all my files. If I reimage the drives they will boot up and work properly. What is going on and how can I prevent it from happening.

I am running XP if that matters.

Thanks for any help.

2

I should you should start looking at your laptop for the source of the problem. You can also try to use the hard drive with another laptop and see if the same problem happens again.

3

This could be either a disk or a board problem, you should try to test it on another system. Then if you detect the same problem you have a bad disk.If the disk work on the other system you should see the maximum amount of memory that your board is capable to receive.