getting too much BSOD !? whats causing it ?

[Master]

Hello All .
recently one of my friends faced multiple BSODs, periodically ! he describes it as sth like this :
he said:

" my system was fairly stable , (and was running for 3 month(24/7) ) with out any kind of problem , untill a day i suddenly
heard a tick! sound from harddisk and then it was followed by a BSOD screen! i restarted and then resumed my work , unsure of what the cause was!
didnt any pay more attention till it happened again ! so i decided to reinstall Windows and everything else along with it, so i started with full formatting of my drive C and installed a fresh windows Os.
then again after couple of hours , when i came back home and went to my PC , i heard that tick sound! and then BSOD appeared again ,and the system restarted automatically ! this time system couldnt boot up windows!
and windows couldnot detect installation partition , so i used another hard-disk of mine which had Windows xp installed on it , and booted up .
when i entered the windows , i noticed all of my faulty?! HDD drives are fine except the first Partition , Drive C ,! which was reported , as a completely free partition as if it didnt contain any files on it! i couldnt enter it though! unlike the other partitions!
i had the same problem with my laptop, . i had all of antivirus and anti malwares updated and running and the whole stuff happened when i tried to clean(disinfect) one of my friends hdd from viruses. ( i dont think its virus , because i reformatted my drive C!)

any way what is the cause , and how can i help him ?
is his harddisk drive faulty?
Thank you all in advance

 

[kenkickr]

I'd grab UBCD, burn iso to CD, and test the ram and HD.

 

[Master]

I'd grab UBCD, burn iso to CD, and test the ram and HD.

i forgot to mention this , he checked the hard disk using HDTUNE to see if there is any kind of bad sector ,
and i just talked to him on the phone , he said that : 24 hours after he scanned his friends hard-disk drive , his system hanged completely and he had to restart physically(pushing the reset button on the case!) , after that since he was afraid of virus infection , he reformatted the drive C and installed a fresh copy of windows , installed everything he needed and updated his security softwares !
it was fine for the past week! till today , and the rest of the story happened!
-and one more thing , he said that he hot plugged his sata hdd , could this cause this problem ?

 

[lindy]

De-cyphering the hex from the bluescreen would go a long way toward fixing the problem.
Example:

Your friend can use a program like Bluescreenview to read the dump.

 

[commission3r]

generally if a hard drive is ticking away its letting u know its getting 2 old for the job
a loud ticking sound is different from the ticking sound when its reading data
when its loud the sound is constant and generally at 1 point on the drive and can cause a bsod or cause the system to hang and reboot if its on the c drive
testing with various software for bad sectors does not always report the problem
if its happening constantly then consider a replacement
formatting can correct the problem but usually its a temporary solution
when data is written to that particular sector and it needs to be read u will experience the same conditions u have encountered already
i have experienced many drive failures and there's no common cause like life it happens
a notice from the drive that its days are numbered is a audible tick much like the sound of the second hand moving on a clock except its stopping at the same place repeatedly causing a lock up
good luck 2 ur friend and suspecting its a virus is premature although not unlikely