Do motherboard problems creates HardDisk Problems? I have p6bxa+ motherboard that always have a loose connection with the pins to the power switch. everytime i open my PC instead of opening it from the switch i still have to short the pins in the motherboards panel. and everytime i start up my PC i always get HardDisk Problems such as lost files, clusters invalid dirrectories. after so many occurences of these errors and reformatting, i tried to use scandisk including surface scan to check my disk and surprisingly i found no bad clusters inside my disk at all. so what gives? im not using my PC since then, im afraid it might create more errors and eat up more of my files and folders. please help. thanks.

Julius, this is the kind of problem that you must take step-by-step until you find the solution. Simply shorting the mobo pins in and of itself will not cause probs with your HDs. However, if you shutdown by just turning off the power without Windows going through it's proper shutdown routine that will cause corruptions eventually. You could have a harddrive in the process of failing to a virus you don't know about. Just start testing and keep going until you find the prob.

As a second thought (I wish the forum had an edit feature) I suggest that you offload all your data in case of major crash. After that you can try hosing your harddrive, reformat and reinstall Windows.

After the backup (see ranchhands last post) run the diagnostic software from the harddrive manufacturer. You can download on their site. This should tell you if the harddrive is the problem!

does it mean i have to reformat the entire disk? i had the disk partitioned into three parts and everytime i encounter the problem i just reformat the partition where the OS is installed. the casing of my PC has a autoshutoff feature but since the incident, i have been shutting off the PC through the AVR. the problem occurs everytime i have to restart the PC after installation of any program. the PC doesnt restart itself. it just went black. and then i just turn off the AVR and back on again or just short its pins. is this what cause the problems?

Sounds almost like you have a low-level file system corruption happening. I think Free Weasel's suggestion above is good. I also suggest running Error Check utility on that partition. >go to Explore >R click drive letter >Properties >Tools >Error Check

thanks ranchhand, free weasel, please stay with me until i solve this problem. i have already downloaded a copy of the disk utility from seagate and i hope this thing works cause im already losing hope and alternatives... for additional information about my problem, after encountering some invalid folder and lost cluster problems i always receive an error message that windows have lost vmm32.vxd and that windows cannot start. i had no choice but to reformat my disk and reinstall everything. this problem goes on and on until i lost hope and stopped using my PC for awhile. ill be trying your suggestions later, i hope that it works. thanks again