I am completely confused on this one. I have been trying to fix my parents' computer for a couple of days now. Background: the PC is running WIN98 on an AMD CPU. The HD is Western Digital 15GB drive. Bought the PC in 99, 2 months later the HD was replaced because it failed. A year later the HD failed again, this time I purchased the Western Digital HD. The latest HD was OK until a couple of months ago when the FAT32 got corrupted. Here is what happens: every couple of months now, the FAT32 files get corrupted, and the computer will not boot. When I run scandisk, all the sectors are OK. I even ran the HD utility and it says that everything is OK with the hard drive. However all the FAT32 are messed up. Scandisk tells me that a bunch of files have invalid names. Can the hard drive be dying? The funny thing is that I took the HD home with me, and plugged it into another computer as a slave. If I boot with another drive, I can read and write to the bad HD. It appears that the drive is physically OK. However, every time I install an OS, files get corrupted. Has any one experience this? Any advise is most appreciate it.

Check the RAM. Doc memory tester Run the test overnight. Any failures at all are not acceptable. Another possiblility is the IDE controller. If you have less than 3 drives, you could move everything to the second controller.