You very efficiently helped me narrow my problems to the root. I'm willing to bet 100 to 1 that the HDD chipboard is indeed the problem.
Discussion
Ya it's a strange problem, makes me wonder why would it fry in the first place or maybe it's as simple as the hard drive is old.
I had a power out. My computer was connected via power surge device, but that was the catalyst to the problem.
Probably a shitty power strip advertised as something more than it was truly capable of.
Something like that happened to me because I bought a powerstrip from a second hand store. I never realized how important they are and buying used ones you don't know the history of how they were used. Losing a hard drive sucks because hard to backup everything right away