Built my first computer. Everything was fine. Then my hard drive started squealing and it would freeze until the squealing stopped. This would come and go. I deduced that it was a capacitor issue and filed an RMA with Western Digital.
When my new HDD came I tried to clone the drive. But every time the cloning got to a certain sector the original HDD would squeal again and freeze. I could not clone. I backed up all my data and wanted to do a clean install of windows on my new HDD.
I only have the media upgrade for windows 7, so I tried using that first. I got the message "windows cannot partition selected drive" when I booted to the install disk. I contacted Western Digital and they RMA'd me again.
Third drive came, same problem. I tried deleting all existing partitions and make a new one to install on but same result. I thought it might be the disk. So i downloaded a windows iso file to a flash drive and tried that. Again it could not format. However, if i formatted the disk using my existing windows (connecting my working-but dying hard drive and the new one and then using disk manager) I could create partitions.
Then If i tried to install using the iso file on the flash drive I could get to the installation I would inevitably get some error about not being able to transfer files or not being able to copy files required for installation or not being able to set the offline locale information during install. None of these mean anything to me. I tried using windows 7 enterprise iso instead, but that didn't work either.
I then tried installing Ubuntu to my HDD, using the flash drive. Again I got the "cannot partition the disk" error.
It doesn't seem possible that BOTH of my RMA HDD's are broken. It has to be something else, right?
I have no idea what to do, have spent a week on this, am nervous I won't get it fixed and am at a complete loss. Please, any help would be appreciated so much. I have no idea where to go from here.