R.I.P. Hard Drive?

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Hi all,

I'd appreciate any advice anyone could give me on a problem I'm having. Just back from a holiday to see my PC seemingly ready to die a horrible death! Seems to be a lot of clicking noises coming from my hard drive and my pc is grinding to a halt after only a minute or so of use. The hard drive light on the box stays on red when it freezes up.

I'm assuming this probably means that the hard drive is on the road out but I'm hoping I'm wrong. I'm sure it's not easy to diagnose with the brief description I've given above but does it seem likely to you guys that it's time for me to by a new HD?

Any advice would be appreciated.

Cheers,
Derek.

 

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well lets not get to that yet...what about the rest of the system? the mobo, the CPU, the memory...its likely the HDD is on its way out...but how long have you had it for?

 

mm, sounds like bad news to me. Have you got another machine to test the drive in? If you have, put the drive in the other machine and if you have the same problem, you know it's the HD.

If it works, then you know it something else. However, I would put my money on it being the HD, or maybe the cable. Anyway you can change the cable?

As alway's this is just my opinion, don't run out and buy a new HD until you know what is causing it for sure!

HTH

Andy

 

Sounds like the same symtoms my laptops having at the moment.
I can sometimes manage to boot up, but then it freezes after ten minutes, and the HD indicator light is off.

When it does boot up successfully I can hear the hard drive sort of motor up.
When it doesn't boot, I can't hear the ahrd drive doing anything.

This leads me to believe it may be a connector.As I think if the HD is knackered, then why would it sometimes boot and sometimes not?
But if it's a conenctor, then maybe somehow the connector is a bit loose or something, and sometimes it's just enough to power the HD and other times it's not.

The problem with is, with it being a laptop, I can't really open it up easily and have a look

I would check the cables first, and possibly buy some new ones which are cheap enough.Test these first.
I'm not a hardware guru, but just my thoughts.Hope you get it sorted.

 

I'd say the prognosis is less than rosy, Doctor

 

Backup! Backup! Backup!

 

im getting some rather loud whirring from my 146gb scsi disk, atleast i think its that disk, i have about 10 disks in this room whirring around lol

i mean, its not horribly loud, but its louder than it should be, and i dont have 800 quid to replace the bugger, looks like its some Raptor 10K SATAs in raid0

deffo sounsd like a HDD problem mate, lound noises are not a pleasant sound, id look into a new purchase asap so you can atleast back up before it goes pop

 

The hdd is definately on the way out. I hope you have all your stuff backed up?

I'm replacing my fourth one in the last 2 months.

 

4th in 2 months???? i do hope your getting the manufacturer to replace them for free!! havnt ever had a hard disk last last than 3 years, infact most lasted me well over 4, except an IBM GXP or whatever, they were faulty all over, lol

 

I've had 3 Fujitsu Siemmen's HD's fail in the space of a month.


Wasn't me who bought them tho, and they were replaced for free . I wouldn't recomend them to anyone!

 

I had similar problems in the past, strange clicking noises from the hard drive, the computer would work, then just re-boot or crash completely on me.

I went out bought a new hard drive and it still did the same thing. Turned out it was the PSU that was faulty. It was overheating.

I'd obviously back your data up if poss straight away just in case a change of hard drive is needed, but check PSU first.

 

Thanks to everyone for the advice, it's very much appreciated.

The HD is about 3 years old which I wouldn't have thought was that much, or does it depend more on usage rather than age?

I'll definately try changing the cables first to see if that helps - trying the cheaper option first seems like the wise move to me! Maybe in a round about way this might be of benefit to me in terms of my A+ study as it'll be my first real chance to get into the guts of a PC outwith changing cards. Yep, that's me trying to put a brave face on it!

Strangely enough I've just switched my machine on to check this thread and it's been noise free so far. I'm not getting my hopes up mind you as it's probably the calm before the storm!

Since it's behaving itself just now I'm going to get some backups done just now just in case. I do need a bigger hard drive anyway but I'd have prefered to have got it in my own time rather than having the decision made for me!

Thanks again to all.

Cheers,
Derek.

 

Sorry Phoenix, I should have made that a bit clearer. They are all from different laptops (Dell btw) and just over 3 years old. We had 3 fail within a month and then looked up the paperwork. They were all from the same batch and then we predicted which one would be next. Guess what? I'm on the 4th now.