hard disk dead?

[jurtje]

Well, I'm finally back home and was playing with my mother's computer this morning, an old celeron 1.3, and trying to overclock it a little (12*120 instead of 12*100, not that much I would say) and all of a sudden, it isn't able to load into windows and the hard disk starts making really weird noise, like attempting to read over and over again, it can get a little into starting up windows but then reboots.

Clocked back to stock and booted from wxp disk. Tried to run chkdsk in the recovery console and after those weird sounds, the computer rebooted again, without being able to finish chkdsk.

Is my HD dead? Can my overclokcing have anything to do with this?

My personal guess is, that not the overclocking but the repeatedly rebooting caused the HD to crap out, being it a 40 gb of about 4 years old.

What do you guys think?

[Trunks]

My dads hard drive was about the same age only a 15 gig not a 40 and recently crapped out. The hard drive would hang constantly and would freeze. Except dads hard drive realized it and gave us a big warning on boot up *artist interpretation* "Your hard drive as a long life it has seen has decided to go on a permenate vacation. Should you choose to hit anykey to continue to boot up you should back up your files immediately because failure is iminent"...or something like that :)

Anywho seems to be like its shot.

[undergroundtech]

If its making a repeating "Clicking" noise, I would say its gone.

I've had the misfortune of hearing several hard drives die in agony.

Its not likely that anyting you did caused it, odds are it just reached the end of its life cycle.

[siq]

Yeah sounds pretty dead, but it could just be that your MBR got screwed up some where. I thought I killed my HD when I was installing linux one time. Computer installed linux then when I went to boot into windows... couldn't find an OS "WTF?!".... so then I deleted linux and windows to do a complete reformat. After that was done it still couldn't find an OS. Turns out my master boot record was so screwed up so I had to do the ol' fdisk to fix it again. Thank God. If it wasn't for that and a Dell script I would have trashed my hd. Keep working on it I say. Sometimes the problem it just something small.

On the other hand if it clicks... it's gone :D

[Alfonse]

You could try dropping it from 6-8" onto your desk, then see if it works. But maybe that's for drives that won't spin up.

[silenze]

If you hear ANY abnormal noise coming from a hard drive, Ever, it *IS* dying, it's just a matter of time, Get Your Data Off Of It! :P

[jurtje]

I tried it with another ide cable and on the other channel, with the same results. It spins up nicely and the bios recognizes it, but as soon as he has to start reading from it, it keeps trying and and trying and trying and then crashes again.

So next week I'll get another HD and try putting this one as slave. Thank god it's only the computer of my mom and there's no important information on it.

damn hard disks.

[Roadracer_4ever]

Try downloading the diagnostic tools from the hard drive vendor's website, and installing them to a bootable floppy, and then run the tests. The diagnostics will tell you a lot about the condition of the hard drive. The diagnostic tools also generally include a formatting tool which will clean the drive completely, and better than fdisk and a 98 boot floppy can.

[jurtje]

Thanks, good idea roadracer. I will download that tool when I'm back home next week, but I fear the worst.

[striker777]

I concur with roadracer's suggestion 100%

[silenze]

lol

just if it's making clicking noises, that isn't going to help.. (if)


hmm... 120mhz fsb.. / 3 = 40Mhz pci ;)

can you say possible corruption?

[jurtje]

I bought a new one and was trying this neat Disk Fitness Test on the old one. It came up with some bad things and it cleaned it entirely (about an hour). It seems to work nicely now, no more weird sounds. I guess like silenze said, the pci clock corrupted the hdd?

[silenze]

Yep, sounds like it.. the high pci bus could've caused the drive to function oddly.. ie; the noises you heard before (hence data all over the place).

[striker777]

Wow, never thought of that...good one silenze.

[jurtje]

It turns out the old hard disk is flacky anyway. Sometimes it shows up in Windowz and sometimes it doesn't, so I guess I won't be keeping all my family pics on there. :wink: