BzBzBzBzBzBzBzBz HDD

Another wired error with 2 student machines. They kept failing to load with either a black screen, a windows system error, Blue screen, or getting into windows after a very long time. Reghosting the machines seemed to work once or twice, but they'd invariably start their old trick again. Popped into the BIOS on one of them and noticed the 80Gb HDD being picked up as a 571Gb HDD called "BzBzBzBzBzBzBzBz".

It looked an easy sequence to google up, but there weren't any real answers apart from it's stuffed. (Even happening on an XBox, so there goes my theory of a virus).

Since it seemed to work sometimes I knew it wasn't totally fried, but it did indicate that it might be a physical issue. I opened up the case and saw that the SATA cable was jammed a bit into the slimline case. Replugging it into a more open SATA port on the mobo had it immediately detect and boot fine. Couple more tests to make sure it's not another red herring ...