PC hard drive dying

I don’t know if I blogged about it, but I certainly complained on Twitter about my Macbook hard drive eating itself at the beginning of the semester. Well, just this morning my Windows hard drive in my PC started acting up. When I booted the computer, I got a “DISK READ ERROR INSERT SYSTEM DISC” message. I unplugged and replugged my hard drive, both data and power, and it booted. However, when burning a backup CD of some Sims 3 data, it crashed. Jon unplugged and replugged the hard drive and it booted again afterward. I played The Sims 3 for a while as a test and it was fine for maybe half an hour, but it crashed again, first to desktop and then I got the Blue Screen of Death. (In Windows 7, no less!) Jon’s poking around in there now, trying out a different hard drive cable (it’s an old, old IDE hard drive that I wouldn’t mind replacing) and unplugging/replugging from the motherboard instead of just the back of the hard drive. If this doesn’t work, I think we’ll go to Best Buy today and get me a new, fast SATA drive because, seriously, I don’t know how old this 70GB IDE is, I just know I’ve had it forever as my Windows drive.

Update: Jon switched out the IDE cable for the one that was hooked to my CDROM drive, so I can’t currently use my CDROM drive but the hard drive so far has been fine. He plugged it into a different port on the motherboard, so I don’t know yet if the problem is 1) the hard drive, 2) the port on the motherboard, or 3) the first IDE cable. I’ve been playing The Sims 3 and nothing has crashed or acted up, so maybe it was the motherboard port or the IDE cable, and my hard drive is actually fine.

Here’s what I’ve been doing with my Sims:

Right, so one of my [normal, living] Sims got an Opportunity to take the remains of a loved one to the science lab so they could be brought back to life. I didn’t have any dead loved ones, so I had my other Sim, a kleptomaniac, go steal something from the graveyard. What she stole was Vernon Carpenter’s remains. So my first Sim took them to the science lab, but the experiment didn’t go fully as planned, and I ended up with Vernon Carpenter as a ghost, but part of my family. He’s completely controllable and is just another family member. I designed for him this snazzy bedroom shown here.