Continuing Hard drive failures in pc

[Avernus]

Ok look, my boyfriend put my PC together awhile back. Asus motherboard, IBM 40 gig drive, AMD Athlon 1.4 ghz processor, 256mb ram, anyways. I have had 3 hard drive failures in this damn thing since he built it. The IBM went down, failed to detect. Put it in another pc and confirmed it was dead. Put another IBM drive in it, couple months later, failed, it was broken though, the head was making noises and junk, couldnt retrieve. Put a maxtor in it, he said it was the IBM drives, oh look, the maxtor is now dead a few months later. Ok I need some advice here. He says it could ONLY be a power management issue or a motherboard issue, but the motherboard does not put power to the hard drive so he says it could not be that. So it would have to be a power management and power supply issue. He checked my power management settings and they were good. The case has changed multiple times so Ive had different power supplys this whole time, never the same failing power supply, so anyone know what could cause something this retarded? Thanks./

 

[Big B]

The IBM's dying, I'm not surprised, particularly if it was one from the 75- or 60GXP line.

I don't know if you still have the drives lying around or what, but you might see if the diagnostic utility from IBM or Maxtor gives any type of error code for you to work with. If it's the same exact problem of failure between all 3, that'd be nice as it might point to the same problem. Might be the IDE cable having some funky issue, but you should've experienced some sort of disk issue instead of a total failure. The IDE port could be screwed up and fail to detect, and in that case, put it on a different IDE port or even another PC to eliminate your system as any potential problem---which has been done on at least one occasion.

Too little power from the power supply might cause premature death, but unless you've been getting some severely underpowered PSU's and not experiencing instability oddly enough.

Beyond a string of just bad luck, I'm not sure what the issue is. I can't really see where power management has any role in this at all either.