So, I just got five HDD's from a small computer shop that reportedly get the Blue Screen of Death. Will a new OS install fix this? As I don't care about the data on the drives. I'm also going to test them on my home PC to see if it was hardware related.

What's the most common cause of the BSOD, and the most common fix? I am in my car right now, so I can't post the error message.

Any help would be much appreciated!

A BSOD is nothing more than Windows not being able to recover from an error. It's usually not related to the hard drive, but it can be if a hard drive failing caused file corruption/missing.

Just run a sector by sector scan of the drive in disk tools, and look at the report. If there are just a few bad sectors then a wipe will get rid of what ever was causing the BSOD. You can even get a boot disk tool to do this or you can mount it in a portable enclosure. There are tools that will really stress the drive if you want to be sure. Look at MajorGeeks.com for some tools.

Lots of bad sectors? Unscrew the case of the drive and see what it looks like and then throw it away. (they are cool if you have never seen the innards close up)

Haha, thanks CCNA, I will.

Defron, so that means that a new OS install and format should fix it right? Or what bootable software should I use to fix this?

There's nothing to fix. The installation of Windows in the old PC faced some unrecoverable error, and would BSOD (BTW: slapping a windows HDD in a new PC will almost always cause BSODs because Windows isn't configured for the new PC's hardware). It's not something to think about

The thing to think about is whether or not the HDD is good. Which you can determine by scanning the HDD as CCNA mentioned.

Now, won't a format and new OS just make this like new? The scan won't be neccesary if I format the drive will it?

Oh and I heard about a hard drive nuking program, that can overwrite the 1s and 0s so they will be completely deleted, that will do everything I want and more right? (The program name was an acronym)

a format cannot fix a bad hard drive, hence you scan it. Otherwise you can waste a lot of time trying to format a hard drive that's unsalvageable.

Thanks Def. What bootable program should I use.