Hard drive help

ronano

Ok first off i apologise if this is in the wrong forum,feel free to transfer it to the correct forum and don't ban me!

Alright i am one of those people who have that tiny bit of tech know how that will enable me to DESTROY the pc hence the reason i am looking for advice.

My hard drive keeps going "clunk" just once and about 5 seconds later my screen freezes.The sound is kinda like when a fried drive continues to try and read itself.I'm assuming one of the platters has a chip in it, the magnetic arm in hitting it every time it spins causing more damage to it which is bad obviously :P the pc was hit about 4 weeks ago and it started acting up 5 days ago.I ran virus scan to see if it was a virus and no,i run scandisk and defrag etc but after an hour it just restarts the operation.Do i need to buy a new hard drive and just ransfer my stuff onto it ? or can it be saved,it seems to work fine untill the clunk and freeze,the pc has been restarted about 17 times incorrectly in its life,12 of which was over the last 5 days.Ok thank you and i apologise agaim

Tivoli

what do you mean by the pc was hit about 4 weeks ago, did you punch it?/lightning/ hurly stick/ect

anyway....

hopefully its a connection problem (unlikely!), reseat the cables into the harddrive, and the ide cable from the drive to the mainboard

could be because its overheating (maybe!), remove it from the pc, and see how it behaves!

could be electrical problem on the hard drive (probably!), back up important stuff and throw it in the bin

check up, you might have a warrenty,and if not get a new drive, they are very cheap, very fast and huge nowadays, so think of it as an upgrade,

as for carrying your os from your old drive to a new drive, try ghosting it, but i am sure you previous install is corrupt by now

never heard of a bad shutdown or a virus damaging a drives hardward, it only corrupts the software on it

ronano

I was being pulled apart by horse and stressed out and i punched the pc once at the side

I have a problem before that the pc would start up and say no os ystem found and i just pluggewd the cables in tightly and it worked fine,it as times still comes up with the no os system found

I never had a problem with overheating before tho the drive is a 80 gb wher as the last one was 20gb if that means anything,iots a maxor drive a few months old and all

I was gonna back up my albums but i said meh and just did essential documents


What os sytem do you recommend for a intel celleron 850mhz 256ram and its EMACHINES(ouch) i have me its vile

Thats it really,any good sites for cheap drives ?

Capt'n Midnight

It SOUNDS like a head crash - not good.
Hopefully it's not really one.

Most HDD manu's have utilities to check thier drives.. look on the web site.

Generally noises ending in 'K' are bad whereas 'G' noises are normal especially for SCSI drives..
clunk / clank / clink eg: sound of ball bareing dropping baddd...
( chugg chugg is normal)

if you have a win98 boot disk you could startup with it and
scandisk c: /surface

Tivoli

the os error, means that bios isn't recognising it ie the software on the not responding (hung), switch it off for about 10 mins to reset it

as for backing up stuff, try plugging the drive into a mates pc as the slave, and copy your important stuff over


now....
either bring drive back where you got it

or if you have no reciept then follow the instructions here

https://www.maxtor.com/en/support/service/rma/create/

you shouldn't have a problem getting a new drive

my sister has the same pc xp with sp1 works great on it

LastIrishMonkey

no effence too maxtor but i saw one of there hard drives explode which was unbelievable sparks and smoke all over and it cracked the hard disk i must take a pc and post it

ando

that HD is gona die, slowly or quickly who knows but its on its way out.

Cake Fiend

Yet Another Dodgy Maxtor (although I doubt punching your fecking PC helped :rolleyes: ). Maxtor have a nice diagnostic tool, have a look on www.maxtor.com for the Powermax utility, but by the sounds of it, the drive is almost certainly on the way out. I've just lost a 40GB QF in the same way.

Funnily enough, I have an 8GB Seagate drive that I've had for years, which I opened up ( :eek: ) a few years ago, which still works perfectly against the odds.