Is my hard drive failing?

[HGeneAnthony]

I have a 200GB Western Digital. I use a dual boot with WindowsXP and CentOS (a Red Hat Enterprise 3 clone). I've been having some weird problems. First I tried installing Fedora Core 3. Whenever I booted up to where it said starting GRUB my computer would restart. I installed CentOS and put a clean install of WindowsXP on. I was copying my files over and first the computer restarted itself. I then got an error trying to go into Windows. I could initially. I went into the Windows install CD and it's showing the main partition, which was NTFS, as Unknown. I wiped everything and decided to try again, this time while copying files I got a BSOD with a memory dump. After I restarted and the same thing. Also I have a 2.4 Pentium 4 and ever since I built this machine I got messages saying the computer was overheating. I bought 3 or 4 fans and nothing. I even took a room fan and put it against the side case after I took off the cover and nothing seemed to help. After I shut off Intel's heat check (it's an Intel board) I left it go for days if not weeks with no problem. I was told the Intel chips run very hot but they will shut down before any damage is done. Under Mandrake 10.1 Community I got constant overheating messages and have to shut off the emergency message feature. Could it be it's overheating, could it be the hard drive going bad, could it be a bad power supply?

[loft306]

possibly try zeroing it out with 'shred' read the man page or wd in there utils cd has a zeroing utility then try to formatt from there!

if it still fails then probably yes

or your partition tables are all screwed up but a zeroing will wipe the drive completely

[HGeneAnthony]

Thanx, I did do that initially but before I installed CentOS I installed Fedora which I thinked caused the issue. I did get an error message when I repaired the MBR in the WinXP CD. 2 caused me some serious problems where it rewrote the CHS table I believe. There was an article on that awhile back it didn't happen to everyone but it happened enough that it was mentioned. I tell you Fedora is one clunky piece of crap.

[sheds]

A hark disk like that, big and recognized brand, may have SMART. This is a BIOS program run at start up that checks for errors and let's you know if there is something wrong with your hard drives. It's part of the power on self test (POST) that is run when the system is booting up. I also use a Pentium 4 (1.9Ghz), but i haven't run into any problems with it, neither win nor linux issues, sorry, maybe that's why everyone knows that we humans learn better from mistakes. Jejeje.

[HGeneAnthony]

I did see S.M.A.R.T. in the BIOS. Didn't get any errors. I wiped all the partitions on the drive, used the Windows 98 boot disk to clear the MBR and I'm making sure to use OS partition tools. Last time I used Partition Magic 8 to format the logical FAT32 partitions. I don't think it'll will make much difference but just in case. Also I tried using dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/zero count=1 bs=512 which I thought would wipe the drive or at the very least clear the mbr but it didn't seem to. Did I do something wrong with that command? How can I simulate a factory default wipe with Linux?

[sheds]

That's a good question, let me do some research. And by the way, i was thinking about another option: maybe if you flash your firmware for a newer version. Maybe it will help, although i am not sure about the risks this operation undertakes. So it's better that you google it first before doing anything.