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Hardware Dying, but which parts?

1K views 5 replies 3 participants last post by  Rockn 
#1 ·
First I will give my system specs so some of the things i talk about are more apparent:

AMD Thunderbird 750 mhz
ECS motherboard(don't have model number handy)
Philips CDRW800
Generic 24x cd-rom
Western digital 30 gb hd(primary)
Maxter 60 gb hd(secondary)
Geforce 2 MX400 64 mb AGP
382 MB PC133 SDRAM
Running Windows XP and Windows 98 SE

Ok, here is what happened, from the beginning. A couple days ago I was trying to clean off my hard drive a bit by burning files to cds and deleting them. Well, one burn failed with a "Fixation Error" and afterwords I couldn't get Nero to work right, so I decided to restart my computer and try then. I had a cd in both of my cd roms. I have my BIOS set up to boot from cd-rom, then floppy, then hard drive. The boot up process got to the first cd-rom, at which point the light on the cd-rom went off, it stopped reading from it, and the boot up hung until I ejected the cd, afterwhich the boot up completed normally. Within a couple hours I started hearing rather bad sounds from what I believe is the hard drive(*rrrrrrr, clink, clink, clunk* ect), usually when I was accessing something from the 30 gb WD HDD. Also my cd-burner would suddenly start attempting to read every few minutes, even if htere was nothing in the drive. That was 2 days ago. Then yesterday a directory of files on that drive was completely written over with junk data, and the clinks and clunks were coming more often. Today it started corruping windows files and i had to repair the installation. Normally I would just assume that the small hard drive is dying, except I don't think that would explain the phenomonon of my cd-rom hanging on boot up if there is anything in the drive, which is had done every time i've restarted my computer since then. I thought that part of the boot up process was handled entirely by the BIOS on the motherboard and had nothing to do with the drivers on the hard drive, so corrupted drivers shouldn't cause this. Does anyone have any clues as to what is going on? And please do tell me it is just my hard drive dying, because that I could probably go without temporarily, but something more serious could be a problem.
 
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#2 ·
First off.....
From your post it seems as though its possible that the hard drive is failing. You shouldnt be hearing any repetitive clicks and clunks.
If you dont have the diagnostic floppy disks for WD or maxtor.
Download them at their website. Run the diagnostic tests on the drives and see if one of them fails the test. That would give you an answer if one of the hard drives is failing. If by chance there's no problems found by the diagnostics. Then let's try the process of elimination. I would disconnect your secondary drive and bootup.

Listen for those noises...
If you hear the noises you'll know its your primary drive making the noises and vise versa.

Also, the system could be hanging if the hard drive is having problems during startup. This could be the reason your cd drive light stays on.

Another thing that crossed my mind. Could the drive be infected with a virus? Since its corrupting your files. Have you ran any antivirus software on your system.

Try those out and let us know what happens....

Good luck!
Rockinmale:cool:
 
#4 ·
This is extremely peculiar....i have run the diagnostic programs from western digital and maxtor, and both hard drives passed, although one had some errors that needed correcting. I honestly can't think of anything else in the computer that could be making that noise, or causing hte other problems.

I am currently running a full virus scan just for the heck of it, although i would think that norton would have cuaght them coming in. I'm kinda running short on ideas here.
 
#5 ·
Norton is a good antivirus program, but it doesnt catch everything. Newer viruses can elude the virus protection software and in most cases render it useless.

I would recommend doing a online scan to make sure your clean.

Try this link
RAV Antivirus

If the drives pass the online scan.

I have a gut feeling the WD is the culprit. While you still have a chance perform backups of your data. Include everything you want to keep. I have had several WD drives mimic the same problems before the drive hosed completely. I could be wrong, but its better to be safe than sorry.

Good Luck!
Let me know how it turns out.....
Rockinmale:cool:
 
#6 ·
If there was an error on the drive (bad sectors I imagine) it will only mark them as bad it will not fix them. This means physical damage to the drive that will only get worse. Back up ueverything and get a new drive. Perhaps yours is still covered under the 3 year warrany before they switched to one year.
 
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