SATA drive not detected, even by diagnostic software

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?

Ok, update time: reboot, this time Western Digital diag software said "non-WD drive detected." Huh. Opened the box to look, sure enough it's a WD. So I took the SATA cable and connected it to the other SATA port on the mobo. Booted right into Vista faster than ever and seems to be working fine at the moment (copying files over to a backup drive while it lasts).

In fact, the drive seems to be working better than ever, with MUCH faster file transfers. So obviously this was not a problem with the disk, right? That seems very apparent now, I guess I'd like a second opinion. If one SATA port went, is the other bound to follow? Is there any other reason it could be acting like this? I'm probably going to send it in for warranty work anyway, since I don't really want one gimped SATA port even if the other one works fine.

If it's a system under warranty...seems to me that the manufacturer can answer those questions better than anyone on this forum.

No point in troubleshooting a system that is under manufacturer's warranty when you think you have a hardware problem, IMO. Doing so may void the warranty.

I would contact the manufacturer, give pertinent details, and see what they think about it.

Louis

What he said There's two opinions