This is no surprise and I say "it was only a matter of time." This particular hard-drive was cloned from another drive... from another drive. In fact, if you trace the original clean install far back enough, I think it goes back as far as Win95 (if not, then at least Win98 non-SE version). So a clean install was due anyway.
Enter my smart-ass suggestion to buy a new drive and start from scratch. Which actually went very well. I installed the drive, made my fresh install of XP (with an "argh-chive" naturally). Then moved all the stuff from the old drive to the new one (which by the way was a nice 200Gb Western Digital). And all was right with the world.
About two weeks later, my father thought the drive was being unusually loud so being the curious little monkey that he is, he opened the case and saw that the drive was visibly vibrating... he "held it up with his finger" and the system immediately crashed. Which is strange because of two things. He actually showed me what he did and I'm stunned that Windows was smart enough to attempt to shut down (it did), and I'm also wondering why it also managed to corrupt the system directory (because it wouldn't detect an OS afterwards).
One wonders if the heads banged into the platters and that caused a total failure or if it's just the system files that are corrupt. Perhaps if I'm lucky it's just that and at worst the Master Boot Record is gone similar to that incident with my own drive a couple of years ago. What's absolutely frustrating is that I can only take my parents word on what REALLY happened the night of the crash. My father says the drive was unusually loud, but my mother says it was not. But both agree that the noise it's making when I plug it in now is MUCH louder than before. I mean, did they break it in their foolish attempt to "fix" something they did not understand, or was it a lemon to begin with? I will never know for certain.
By incredible coincidence, the motherboard has had a lemon-fresh-scent for years, a new problem surfaced at the same time as this drive crash. On occasion it would report a RAM failure and I'd reseat the sticks... or pick a different slot. Whatever. We have discovered this time that shutting down the main switch on the power supply somehow will reset the motherboard. Waiting about 20 seconds for those faulty capacitors to recharge and then hitting the Power switch in the front will suddenly allow the machine to boot normally. Of course, it took me all weekend to realize any of this (because I fiddled with the sticks each time and turn off the main power to do so every time; so I would think it worked because I changed sticks, or changed DIMM slots, or remove a particular unreliable sticks)...
Anyway, so as it turns out the motherboard is probably on its last leg. I put back the older drive (which was a very respectable 60Gb Maxtor that hasn't given us any problems). Installed WinXP (again from the "argh-chive) and got them up and running before I left. The only thing that remains unresolved is all the data that may or may not be lost on the crashed drive. I brought it back here with me so I'll see what I can do.
One thing's for sure, I need to recover the data and format the thing before I think about taking it back to Futureshop to complain. Regardless whether it was my father's fault for ignorantly opening up a case that was still powered on, he wouldn't have done that if the drive wasn't making a substantial noise (I lean towards my father's side of the story because quite frankly there've been instances where I think my mother's starting to get a little bit deaf). Anyway, there are family photos and legal documents containing important bank information among the hoards of warez that my brother downloaded but never cleaned up. And on top of that a not-so legal copy of Windows was on that drive so I'm hesitant to allow that bit of trivia out of my hands in the "real" world.
Hmmm... maybe I'll be paying mrbabou a visit sometime soon... :P
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