Running Vista, have a Western Digital 250 gig internal SATA drive. About a month ago, the computer suddenly slowed down, crashed, and then threw a "disk access error" message on reboot. A friend recovered files of the drive, cleared it and reinstalled Vista after the drive passed all diagnostic tests. After that, it ran fine for a week, then died again. I ran Vista repair, it booted up and ran fine for more than two weeks.
Last night, it died again, and several attempts at Vista repair failed. Then this morning it booted up into Vista, but after a few minutes, it would hang or freeze. I could get it to reboot a few times, but it kept hanging and crashing after a minute or two. Eventually, Vista repair stopped working. And NOW, when I try to boot it, the BIOS doesn't detect the drive at all. I booted from the Western Digital diagnostic software, and even that returns "No Disk Found."
My question is, is this just a dead drive, or is this more likely a problem with the SATA controller on the motherboard? I'm going to put in a different SATA drive later tonight or tomorrow, but I'm worried that a new drive might work for a while and then succumb to the same problem. If it's the mobo, the computer is still under warranty.
Thoughts?