P.O.S. Dell fries Hard Drives

a customer gave me a 'spare' system he had sitting around his office

when i plugged it in, it detects the HD but hangs when it tries to load windows.

i figured the HD was dead so i swapped in a spare Fuji i had

worked great for about 2 or 3 days... and then all of a sudden... now the Fuji is having the exact same problem. Detects fine in BIOS but when it tries to read the HD the system hangs.

i figured it was just some sort of corruption so i got the fuji low-level format Util, but it gives me an errormessage at the end. Windows installations will not boot with this HD attached, so i cant format or partition from within windows. I'm trying a format from a bootable win2000 CD, but its taking far too long for a 10 gig drive.

anyone ever seen a computer that fries Hard Drives?

yes

way back in the Celeron 400 days, when overclocking was been done like crazy, the pci bus was set at a fixed fraction of the fsb. People would overclock their boards, the pci clock would get set to like 44 mhz instead of 33, screwing around the ide controller and damaging the disk eventually