Urgent problem: is my HDD failing?

DarkSilver · Post by **DarkSilver** » 2005-04-13 11:19am

Ok, I have a problem which cropped up last night with my main comp. While I was working on a graphics project, the comp locked up, and I heard something spinning down in the computer, of which I'm almost positive it was one of my HDD's. Windows froze, but I still retained mouse movements, but could not do anything, open a window, bring up the task manager, etc.

Rebooting the computer failed to detect the primary HDD, about five times (rebooted that many times just to see....). I turned off the computer for the night, and powered it up this morning to see, and it detected the main hdd.

It worked for all of ten minutes, when it did the same thing as last night, the computer froze, I heard the sounds of something spinning down, and poof, rebooting revealed it no longer detected the primary master hdd.

Is my suspision of a failing hdd valid? Or is there something I am missing in this.....

oh, and the last problem I had, the radeon 9350 vid card, ended up being my power supply, while I do have a 300 Watt PS, and the manual suggest 250W and over, getting a bigger power supply repaired said problem. So thank all of you which helped.

Steven Snyder · Post by **Steven Snyder** » 2005-04-13 11:21am

Be concerned, be very concerned.

If it fails again you might try reseating the cables, but otherwise this does sound like a dying HDD.

Faram · Post by **Faram** » 2005-04-13 11:25am

Buy a new HD and junk that one, it is dead and cannot be trusted.

DarkSilver · Post by **DarkSilver** » 2005-04-13 11:27am

thanks guys...glad to know my concern was valid..

good thing all my important shit is saved to the spare HDD.

Xon · Post by **Xon** » 2005-04-13 11:34am

Your harddrive has imploded. Stop using it. Physically disconnect it (power and data cables) and chuck a new harddrive & install your crap on that.

Once thats done, you can being the process of copying stuff off the drive in stages when its usable. You will probably have todo it in small chucks, only copy what you need too.

Not requiring the drive for boot(as in it will only spin up, not undergo a bunch of heavish reading & writing) will probably give you enough time to get some stuff off it.

DarkSilver wrote:oh, and the last problem I had, the radeon 9350 vid card, ended up being my power supply, while I do have a 300 Watt PS, and the manual suggest 250W and over, getting a bigger power supply repaired said problem. So thank all of you which helped.

What brand & model is your power supply? A power supply can make a lot of differents to the stability of your computer.

DarkSilver · Post by **DarkSilver** » 2005-04-13 11:41am

ggs wrote:
DarkSilver wrote:oh, and the last problem I had, the radeon 9350 vid card, ended up being my power supply, while I do have a 300 Watt PS, and the manual suggest 250W and over, getting a bigger power supply repaired said problem. So thank all of you which helped.
What brand & model is your power supply? A power supply can make a lot of differents to the stability of your computer.

A Radeon 9250 Xtasy (not 9350, typo on my part) 128MB AGPx4/x8, the power supply was one which came with the case back when I built the comp about 7 years or so ago, so it's rather old.

I got a new power supply though, and the problem was that it was causing the computer to shutdown and randomly reboot, because the card drained to much power.

I'm going out to get a new HDD this morning, so thanks everyone on confirming my suspisions.

Vertigo1 · Post by **Vertigo1** » 2005-04-17 03:53am

I don't suppose you tried giggling the power cable? What you hear is the motor spinning down. I've had that happen a couple of times and it ended up being a faulty power connection. A simple re-soldering job fixed that. If giggling it doesn't work change to a different power cable. You should also go into your BIOS and see what voltages you're getting. (It'll be under power management)