I was just hoping that someone could give me a clue as to why my hard drive has been acting up, or rather, not acting at all. Very recently, I underwent a terrible hard drive failure that put me out of commission for a few months until I could purchase a new one. (I just finished high school and don't have a regular job.) That being said, I installed the new hard drive I recieved via Amazon.com (Western Digital 250GB SATA, Caviar Blue I believe) and it worked fine... for two months. Just yesterday my computer randomly crashed while I was playing a PC game and when it booted up, it came up with the infamous "NTLDR is missing" error. (Along with some funky characters including a green musical note, something one of my friends found somewhat amusing.)
I'm certainly not a computer expert, but I tried a few things and searched the Internet to look for clues. Nothing worked because the computer, all of a sudden, stopped recognizing the hard drive. (I hadn't looked before searching the error.) The boot options saw my CD drives (I have no floppy drive), and one 0.0GB blank space. (I tested it out by unplugging the hard drive before I turned the computer on and I was getting the same error, with the computer acting the same.)
So... I figured, maybe a SATA cable problem, or at worst a larger hardware problem (motherboard, etc.) until I had the idea to test my old failed hard drive that is still sitting in the case. (It still boots up but quits spinning after a few minutes and crashes the computer.) Stumping me even further, the drive worked perfectly. (Or as perfectly as a failed hard drive can.)
My question, in lieu of certain circumstances, is could my luck have been so bad to have a hard drive fail in two years and then purchase a defective hard drive, or could the hard drive problems have been caused by a larger problem? For reference, I'm running a GT5224 Gateway PC.
Thanks in advance, and I'll reply with any necessary information needed.
Modification: I may have found the problem myself. The computer isn't even recognizing the afflicted hard drive in the BIOS setting page, but it does recognize other SATA hard drives. I'm just going to wing it and buy another hard drive.
