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.
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.