Dr.HD

Hard drives are crap!

Some friend of mine brought his computer for a fix. As soon as the Windows logo showed up the computer restarted. Great, just a quick format and full re-installation of Windows will do the trick.
But, it was too easy and unfortunately did not work. So I attempted to figure out what was the actual problem.

First I started with the hard drive. I used and always have been using UBCD (Ultimate Boot CD) to do full diagnostics. This piece of software is great, it's free, it can be burned to a cd and is bootable. It includes NTFS reader, network browsing, virus scan, etc.
I think it's the only tool you need to diagnostic any computer problem. It always have been saving me time. 

But running a diagnostics on a hard drive can be long...

Another solution could be to listen to the sound the drive does and get a disgnostic from the following site.
http://datacent.com/hard_drive_sounds.php