Consecutive Hard Drive Failures

[Ghorn]

Hi

I'm looking for some guidance with some strange hard drive problems.

At work we have a collection of Dell Optiplex GX400 all with identical hardware.

Today one of them wouldn't boot up giving an error of not being able to find the hard drive; the BIOS could not identify any IDE device while the hard drive was plugged in - both the HD and CD drive were listed as 'Unknown Device'. The moment I unplugged the hard drive (or put another one in) everything worked correctly.

Figuring the drive had simply died, I started cloning a similar (2nd) drive onto a replacement (3rd) drive using the same computer (both were booting correcting initially and the 2nd/3rd drive came out of identical computers as the first). The cloning process failed part way through however and now the 2nd drive is behaving the same way the 1st was with the BIOS and is also clicking and beeping on boot. The destination drive of the clone (3rd) appears to be fine however.

The hard drive model of the two failed drives is IBM Deskstar, Model IC35L020AVER07-0.

I'm not sure how to proceed and any insight would be much appreciated. It seems that the computer itself is damaging the drives, something i don't know how to remedy. I can't get any computer to recognize either of the failed drives at all in the BIOS and would like to be able to recover data off the two.

Thanks