HD Failure

If it is damage yes, also the heat of the cpu.


may be it is wrong with the second question, any hardware device that is making problems with your HD, try to desactivate one by one your cards (hardware) and check if the hd works, till finding which hardware is making that problem...

it can cause many things also the power supply, any removable disk, or the HD is damage (if it is only making problem with X hard disk).

Hard Drive
I have Built about 7 computers for family and friends and what I have found is that Western seems to me to have a hight failure rate. Most of my computer have two hard drives and in the past I have had three Western failures and never a Maxtor failure. As A matter of fact one of my Maxtor drives is a 15 gig in my wife's computer and it is still running fine. As for hard drive failures you must remember that it is a mechanical device with moving parts. If you think that you may have other problem with your computer, such as motherboard, CPU, etc you can always try booting from a floppy or a CD rom and unpluging your hard drive. If this seem's to work OK then your problem has to be your Western Hard Drive. The last one I returned to Western had a 1 year warrenty and I got a RMA number from their Web site. If your power supply failed your computer would not boot and the fan in the back of it would not run. If you decide to try to boot from floppy or cd-rom you may have to go into your bios setting and under advance setting this tells your computer the boot sequence you want. First boot - floppy, second boot - cd-rom, third boot - hd (hard drive). These are the normal or preset setting on most computers. A good floppy boot disk would be a WINDOWS 98 start-up disk. Hope this was of some help.

Spikes was the culprit
Thanks for the help and advice from the both of you - much appreciated! I have myself built a number of computers and found that once in a while, you get a "rotten" apple...this happened to be it. Anyway, I took my power supply from my computer off and exchanged it with one that I salvaged long ago....and it works! It hasn't clicked (Knock on wood) in more than 45 mins now. (Where before it started acting up after 5 minutes!). Once again, thanks for everything....always great to hear from fellow computer nerds (meant in the best way possible! )