WD hdd failure

[joecass]

About 5yrs ago I bought a WD 160GB PATA hard drive, that I never used.
Last year, I installed it in an old desktop using Vista
Every so often I get a boot error message " Boot Disk Failure - insert System Disk"

Does this mean the drive is defective ? Originally, an older WD 80GB drive was
in the same machine using XP, and never gave any error messages

[Bjs]

Models with BB were ticking time bombs ... the next to follow where also plagued with faults ... you might try replacing the cables connected to it and see if it wasn't simply a communication issue between the unit and motherboard.

Try Active@ Hard Disk Monitor ... if it tells you the drives raw read or spinup is below 80% then its possible the drives on its way out .

If you must reinstall vista you should do it the old way using western digital's data life tools to format the drive first then just do a install without formatting ... Ive seen quite a few systems where vista formatting has completed and this same error appears soon after ... there's something buggy about it ... and in my tests using maxtors / wd's ... drives run cooler using the older tools to do the formatting.

[joecass]

Thanks for the informative info..... the drive is a WD 1600JB model..... the older 80GB drive is a BB.
If I remember correctly, the 160GB drive was originally formatted using Win XP Pro, then I decided to
try Vista..... but the boot up error message appeared with XP Pro when I was running that O.S.

I'll try changing the data cable and your suggestions. Just trying to determine if the drive is defective
and needs to be replaced