Hard Drive going?
SpywareShooter
127.0.0.1
I have had my computer for over 4 years, and with the way technology is now-a-days, most stuff isn't made to last that long. My hard drive has always been loud, so loud that I can hear it across the house. But at random times it will get around 2x louder than normal (as I'm typing this its much louder), and it is starting to get annoying. I downloaded a few .wav files that demonstrated what a dieing hard drive sounds like, and this is similar to one (the file was called cycleclick.wav, but it doesn't "stall" when clicking something, just the background noise). In the four years that I have had this computer, I have not done one upgrade to any hardware, due to my lack of knowledge of it. It is a 6.96GB hard drive. Since this started, I have been deleting any unneeded files to possibly reduce stress on the hard drive, but the problem still persists. Can someone tell me what's wrong? (I can upload the file I downloaded if you want to hear it)
Also, I'm not sure if this is related to the loudness, but a few minutes ago someone IMed me on MSN with a link (which I know was not malicious in any way). At that time, I was also reading posts here at Short Media. When I clicked the link, IExplore and MSN Messenger stopped responding. Upon clicking CTRL ALT DEL, I noticed that my Hexidecimal-To-Text converter was running twice, although I haven't used it in the past few hours. When I went to click End Task, a blue screen came up that said it was trying to read from a floppy disk (I did not have a floppy in at the time). I clicked Cancel, but the screen was just black with the Internet Explorer Status Bar at the bottom. I clicked CTRL ALT DEL again, and my computer gave me another blue screen, which said the system had become unstable. Finally, I decided to just reboot.
Does anyone know what's wrong with my computer?
Also, I'm not sure if this is related to the loudness, but a few minutes ago someone IMed me on MSN with a link (which I know was not malicious in any way). At that time, I was also reading posts here at Short Media. When I clicked the link, IExplore and MSN Messenger stopped responding. Upon clicking CTRL ALT DEL, I noticed that my Hexidecimal-To-Text converter was running twice, although I haven't used it in the past few hours. When I went to click End Task, a blue screen came up that said it was trying to read from a floppy disk (I did not have a floppy in at the time). I clicked Cancel, but the screen was just black with the Internet Explorer Status Bar at the bottom. I clicked CTRL ALT DEL again, and my computer gave me another blue screen, which said the system had become unstable. Finally, I decided to just reboot.
Does anyone know what's wrong with my computer?
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Comments
Also, they don't sell 6.96GB hard drives anymore, do they? In my overclocking thread, I was told that to get a bigger hard drive I'd have to get a new motherboard, which alltogether would cost hundred(s) of dollars.
Or you can usually tell in your BIOS, while the computer is booting up it will say something like MAXTOR 6EHY004 or WD 200JB, etc.
What kind of computer do you have? Do you know what motherboard you have? Only ANCIENT computers can't support anything larger than 8.4gb HDs. Chances are, with a BIOS update, you can support up to a 120gb drive. Four years is indeed old, but not THAT old.
GENERIC IDE DISK TYPE01
That's all htere is for properties on the hard drive.
Also, when booting, that screen just pops up for a second, too fast to read what it says.
I have an eMachines Etower 566i2, and I don't know what kind of motherboard I have. How would I go about upgrading the BIOS?
EDIT: Here is Western Digital's download page .
I'll tell you what. I have a Promise FastTrack 100 raid controller. It's a PCI card. You can plug that into your motherboard, hook a new drive up to that, and it will support up to 120gb drive and be faster than your onboard controller. I'll give it to you. When you get it, we can explain how to hook it all up, ghost your stuff over, and in the end it will be faster. If that sounds good to you, PM me your address and I'll get this thing in the mail tomorrow.
I'll come and pick it up myself!
I am not new to computers but no very little about the inside works.
I have followed many comments here and on other forums that sound like my problem. First, computer is a Toshiba Laptop.. Satellite A205 I think, I am not on it now. Problems arose first with flash cards, it drove me nuts till some guy said to cut them off and I did. The sorry they don´t work message comes up when I boot.
In the last few weeks, the screen become lined with patterned collors and blinks and flits. Usually black is the main color then sometimes red or yellow. Occasionally only yellow but it looks like a radiator. little squares jumping.
I am hearing first, connect it to an outside monitor. Ok, I can do that.
If it does it, it is not the Screen itself. omg. Then, you and others have posted things that tell me I can check the drivers from other places like IBM since Toshiba does not do that... I copied all that stuff, thanks.
Usually it is when I first boot. OR it happens if the machine goes to sleep. Now that is the first I have heard of this problem from anyone.
Machine goes into sleep mode... I go to turn it on, hold it down nicely and up comes a screen filled with the black blinking horizontal stuff. However, if I was alseep myself, it might have gone into that mode before it went into sleep mode. Thus, I am just brining it back up.
I have had to manually turn off the computer many times and I hate that but it won´t go away with tiime or buttons or anything. It just sits and goes ¨dumb¨
Any more advice. I am disabled, a sr. citizen and on a tiny income, the computer is my lifeline. Its only 3 1-2 years old. My high school class gave me money to partially buy this when my pc was stolen four years ago. How can I fix it without high cost?
Thank you. HOP