Hard drive Knackered

dubmick

As the title suggests my hard drive is nearly on it's way out. I keep getting blue screens, I have formatted a few times and the errors keep recurring.

Instead of buying a new pc now I think I'll just replace the hard drive and buy a new pc after Christmas. At least then I'll be able to sell the old pc.

I can get a 160 gb 3.5" ide from Komplett for cheap enough but I've got some money on my paypal account so I think I'll try ebay first.

Any makes to avoid? I've heard bad things about Maxtor.

Thanks

Mick

hopeful

my personal preference is for Seagate drives...but I've also got WD, Maxtor and Samsung drives.

Only major issue I've had is one Seagate drive dying...but that was because my wife moved the tumble dryer next to my media server so the drive got a little hot...the SMART record showed the max temp as 80c before it gave up!

The Samsung drives are renowned for being very quiet if that is an issue.

Ghost Train

Since hard disks don't like getting bumped around getting hard disks off ebay might not be such a good idea, if this thing is packed well it should be okay but I've always been happiest buying hard disks from a store or shop. Have you checked pcworld, maplin, peats they normally all sell hard drives and the price is normally not too bad.
But then is you want to spend your paypal credit maybe you can check first how the ebay seller packages the drives
At the moment i'm using a samsung drive I think, I've had some issues with western digital drives, luckily they seemed to fail slowly and never died completely

dubmick

it's not looking good for getting a HD on ebay anyway, seems very few sellers will deliver to Ireland and if they do the p&p is expensive.

SwampThing

Are you 100% sure it's the HDD?

Have you tried another disk, a known good one, to verify the disk is the problem?

There could be many reasons for the blue screens; PSU issue, memory issue, simply an over-heating problem and as this is the only symptom you mention, I'd suggest you try some other things before splashing out on a new disk only to find the problem hasn't gone away.

I've a 10GB disk I'll loan you if you want to double-check.

dubmick

yeah, nearly sure it is the hd. The errors starting happening about a month ago. I was getting the dreaded blue screen with the error 'unmountable boot drive volume'. I did a search for this and I found that it looks like the drive is on it's way out. I ran chkdsk and eventually got the pc back up running (and backed up my info to an external hd). Since then I've formatted the damn thing 3 times but the errors keep coming back

Cheers for the offer of the spare hard drive anyway. Would you agree that it is the hard drive?

Stephen

Is the drive making any funny noises? Be particularly fearful of 'clunk' type sounds.

dubmick

No, it hasn't been making any funny noises.