hard drive dying, mother board?

Hey guys, Here are the symptoms, random rebooting, chkdsk finding constant errors after these reboots, mouse and sound lag, CPU usage 70 to 100% at times, event viewer shows that CPU is having a difficult time communicating with hard drive, have had the hard drive fail at boot once. This happened about 2 weeks ago and it's been working fine, I was able to repair the install. Now it seems like it's ten times worse. Could this be something as simple as a bad IDE cable?
Here is the message I got from the person having the problem that has reoccurred. I don't understand how it could work flawlessly for 2 weeks and just start acting up again. That would not be consistent with power supply problems would it?

"when it was searching for IDE drives it stalled for about 20 seconds (and still does after a restart). Now I have extremely bad lag and the sound doesnt seem to work. CPU usage is in the 80% to 100% range right now. I got a program that told me what temperature my computer was running on and it was very cool. I just finished another full checkdisk scan before i started writing this and it said stuff like, "Replacing XXXX with XXXX" 1 or 2 times. Brandon said he'll use his money to pay for whatever it is to fix the computer (like he didnt say that before though), but I dont know what it is. System Restore, RamTest, Spyware, Adaware, Virus Scan, nothing even made it slightly better, Checkdisk actually made it slower it seems like. Im gonna try running scandisk and just leave it on while I sleep, i'll send another mail of how that went. After that though, theres nothing else I can think of except replacing the bugged part, if i can find out.

PS. According to Event Viewer its had a large amount of Red X's with source "disk" and saying it timed out to the harddrive, so thats the biggest bet it looks like. "

Any ideas where to go from here guys? Currently running WD diagnostic utility. I thought about buying a power supply tester from Circuit City. Don't really know how to proceed. =(

thanks,
1MT

 

I would definitely check the IDE cable and the 4-pin power supply plug to the hard drive. They could be loose, dirty or defective. This would be an inexpensive repair and at least eliminate it as a problem. Once this is done run the WD diagnosics to rule that problem out. From there proceed with the power supply. You still can not rule out malware though.

 

thanks

That is where I am going to go, although currently they have the Diagnostic running. Probably shouldn't have done that without checking the cable first.