Hard drive gone?

dub45

Recently I have been having trouble with Windows freezing on me - then it got to the stage where it would freeze on start up - a little click would happen each time.

I decided to reinstall thinking that maybe there was a driver conflict or something like that but lo and behold during reinstall there was a click!
the install did not complete and again its freezing on the start up screen (I was able to fully format the drive no problem prior to the reinstall) given the likely absence of drivers being the cause the only thing I can think of is that the hard drive has become defective anyone any ideas?

Endurance Man

What make HDD is it? Most manufactures have a boot up program that will do extensive scans on the HDD to check for errors.

Ruu_Old

after the click, is there any activity at all? how old is the hard drive?

SwampThing

I think you have a duff drive there dub45.

Even if you get everything to re-install, would you trust the drive?

Bite the bullet and get a replacement - only way to b sure. You could then pop the dodge one in as a slave drive and try some of the diagnostics Endurance suggests.

gamer

If thats a large drive set it up as slave drive d: slave ,fdisk it ,set up 1st partition 200meg, then second, partition the rest of hd space ,ie 330gig.So you can,t boot off it, but u cud use it to store mp3,s gamedemos,etc . Buy another drive to act as primary drive c:\ ,install windows on c: .leave 1st 200 meg empty.Dont put any important,vital data on it, cos it may fail in future. Theres no point in throwing away 100gig hd ,just cos its not bootable.Or sell it on boards, for a lower price ,pointing out its not gauranteed, and it will not boot up, could be used as a slave drive.the hd companys like maxtor etc have downloads/progs free ,that will test out their hard drives.

bpmurray

If you managed to format the disk without problems, I don't think it's directly something with your HD.

SwampThing

gamer wrote:

..set it up as slave drive d: slave ,fdisk it ,set up 1st partition 200meg, then second, partition the rest of hd space ,ie 330gig.So you can,t boot off it, but u cud use it to store mp3,s gamedemos,etc .

Gez, gamer, you just can't help yourself!

OP - take this advice at your peril, if you can make sense of it first.

dub45

bpmurray wrote:

If you managed to format the disk without problems, I don't think it's directly something with your HD.

Instinctively I am sceptical that it is the hard drive that is causing the problem but is there anything else it could be?

I presume maybe wrongly that if it was an overheating problem the pc would shut down - and all the fans stay working after the freeze.

SwampThing

The click is more than likely the heads in the drive hitting the platter or the solenoid controlling the head shooting it back across the disk.

Easy test - put another disk in it. Tell you what, I've a 10GB disk here I'll give you if you need it.

gamer

Get a win98se bo0t disk,you can alwaysuse that,boot pc do scandisk and chkdisk, that has built in cdrom driver universal,my advice partition,hd, into 3 ,1 st 10percent ,say its prbably fault,leave empty,fdisk ,but leave it inactive,u can install windows on partition,2 ,say 50percent drive space,then partition,3.is 40percent space left.fdisk partition2 as active primary partition, it will show up on pc as d: ,so install windows on drive d:\ .
OR IF YOU ARE IN A HURRY ,just setup whole drive as a slave drive,buy another drive to act as drive c: \ set up as the primary master on 1st ide cable ,TO install windows in .YOU NEED AT LEAST 6gig hd to install winxp,in my experience.
You will need to format each partition ,ITS safer to format in FAT32 ,COS IF THERES ANY BOOT PROBLEMS,,you can use a boot disk to rescue data, its easy to get locked out of a hd if it is formattted in NTFS format.

SeanW

Something similar happened to me about a year ago.

One startup, Windows files became corrupted and whenver I tried to reinstall Windows, Setup would just freeze a few minutes in.

I looked at my startup messages in BIOS and saw there was something funny going on with my RAM, at that point I had 2 sticks of 128MB PC2100.

So I pulled one of the sticks, the one that came with the computer, and voila-problem solved.

If you suspect, and it looks like you may have some good reason, that your hard drive is at fault, that's obviously a good place to start.

But if you find changing the HD doesn't fix the problem, you may want to turn your attention to your RAM, which I'm very much inclined to believe may be the problem.

BTW What operating system are you running?