dying harddrive?

Tange1Tange1
edited March 2006 in Hardware
Hey everyone, I hope its ok to post this problem here, its an emergency to me. I have a dimension 4600 from dell with what I believe to be a dying harddrive. Every so often while using the system everything locks up, the mouse stops working, no key combo's work, no screen saver activating etc. Also when this happens I have a solid hard drive light. I am forced to power off the whole system. Also a few times that this has occured it has been followed by or precedded w/ loud clunking from a hard drive. I've gone ahead and ran maxtor's software and western digital's test on all drives on my system. -- they all passed --. Yet the problem seems to continue.

I believe I have narrowed it down to a 180 gb maxtor drive that holds my desktop and my documents (I moved them). The reason I believe it is this drive is beacause after a lockup my desktop icons get shifted around and beacause for awhile maxtor's maxblast would not pick up the drive to test it. Later though the drive was picked up and the drive passed quick and extended testing.

HELP, what else could it be? If its a disk I have no problem trashing it and getting a new one but I'm not %100 that its the problem.

Notes: Nothing is visible in event viewer logs, system was turned on shortly before 9, I left it till 10, came back to it frozen. Checked the logs only to find normal startup stuff shortly before 9 and normal startup stuff from when it was rebooted after being frozen.

Comments

  • LeonardoLeonardo Wake up and smell the glaciers Eagle River, Alaska Icrontian
    edited March 2006
    Thanks for describing the symptoms so well. It makes diagnosis much easier. A hard freeze could be symptomatic of a number of problems, but the specifics of the apparent drive's "clunk" sound and momentary failure of the Maxtor utility to detect the drive lead me to say that the drive is probably starting to fail.

    If I were you, I'd backup/copy all the important data off that drive right away, before you do anything else. Heat and voltage problems can also cause freezes. Is the inside of your computer, especially the fans, free of dust and lint buildup?
  • Tange1Tange1
    edited March 2006
    Thanks for the reply. Finally the bad drive has spoken up. Last night while using windows I heard the clunks followed by a lockup. I immediatly turned it off and booted into maxtor's utility w/ hopes to have it give me a failure code to be sure I was looking at the right drive. This time it picked up all my drives and didn't hang on detecting drives. I ran a test on the drive and within a few minutes I heard more clunks while the test was running. Sure enough this time it failed. Odd how it passed perfect a few hours ago..

    As for the system in general, I think its OK. I've never had overheating issues and infact added a harddrive cooler just to be sure. I will double check that though.

    So w/ this drive down I'm considering a Raptor X to replace my aged raptor WD360 (37 gigs). So expensive...so tempting...
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