Author Topic: Hard Drive Going South? (Read 616 times)

eskimo2 · « **on:** October 02, 2004, 01:37:07 PM »

My system has been becoming more and more unstable. It locks up frequently and I get CTDs from various programs regularly. It often will even lock up when I restart it. The latest defrag and scandisks that I have run have found some bad spots on the HD. I’m thinking that I should replace the HD and upgrade to XP (it’s running ME now). Is there a downloadable free program (or an existing program built into Windows) that can evaluate my hard drive and determine if it is going South?

My System is a bit over 3 years old:
OS = Win ME
MB = ECS K7AMA 1.0
Processor = 1.40 gigahertz AMD Athlon - 128 kilobyte primary memory cache - 256 kilobyte secondary memory cache
RAM = 1024 MB DDR (Crucial)
Video = NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200
HD = 40.01 Gigabytes Usable Hard Drive Capacity - 23.53 Gigabytes Hard Drive Free Space

Thanks,
eskimo

eagl · « **Reply #1 on:** October 02, 2004, 02:49:34 PM »

What brand hard drive?

Is it making any noise like loud whining or clicking?

Does it get hot when running?

Do you have any fans blowing across the hard drive?

Have you tried removing and re-seating the hard drive ribbon and power cables?

If it's an older IBM deskstar, it might be dying since some of the IBM drives built between 2 and 3 years ago had a really high failure rate especially when used in computers that were left running most or all of the time.

It sounds like regardless of what's wrong, it's time to start keeping regular backups and consider buying a new hard drive. They're pretty cheap right now... I saw a deal somewhere for a 200 gig drive for $115, and you can get 80 gig western digital drives for $60 or less. http://www.newegg.com changes their sale items on their homepage every day and they almost always have a hard drive on sale for a reasonable price, so you can start there.

As for diagnostic software, you could try the hard drive manufacturer's support web site and look for their utilities download.

llama · « **Reply #2 on:** October 02, 2004, 07:54:45 PM »

If your hard drive scanning programs are reporting bad blocks, the writing is on the wall: YOUR HARD DRIVE IS GOING SOUTH NOW!!!!!

In addition to the restarting symptoms you are reporting, I don't need to hear any more. I maintain and repair computers for a living, and am the IS/IT department for many small businesses. If any one of them called me with what you are reporting, I would schedule an appointment for THE NEXT DAY to replace the hard drive before it totally failed.

If you don't care about any of the files or the configuration of any of your programs on this computer, then just let the drive fail and start over with a new drive and XP.

If you care at all about your data, you need to back up your files to floppies, or a ZIP drive, or another hard drive (already installed or an external unit) or a CD ROM, or another computer on your network NOW. NOW NOW NOW!!! Stop reading this post and do it NOW!!! I am not joking.

If you care about your system's configuration, then after you read this, turn off your computer and keep it off. The longer it is on, the more time it has to fail on you. Buy another hard drive, and while you are at the store, by a copy of Ghost or DriveCopy or similar program. Install the second drive and use the copy program to copy all your contents over. Then remove your old drive and boot off the new one to make sure it works. Then keep that old drive in a drawer for a few weeks to make sure the new drive is working. Then toss it.

Seriously, you have all the warning you need to take action before a critical failure occurs and your valuable personal data or your configurtation is lost.

Only after things have settled down with the new drive should you even think about going to XP.

Good luck.

-Llama

eskimo2 · « **Reply #3 on:** October 02, 2004, 09:55:27 PM »

Thanks guys, I just burned everything onto CDs. I found that the fan on the video card stopped. I don't know if that matters at all, but I think I'll replace the HD soon.

eskimo

214thCavalier · « **Reply #4 on:** October 03, 2004, 05:08:57 AM »

A dead fan on your graphic card would certainly have caused lock ups and freezes.

eskimo2 · « **Reply #5 on:** October 03, 2004, 08:18:45 AM »

Office Max has a 40 GB Western Digital HD for $40.
Best Buy has an 80 GB Seagate HD for $50. (Both after rebates.)
I only had less than 5 GB of personal stuff in a few years, so I doubt that I will need a 80 GB drive, but If Seagate has a better reputation I'd gladly spend the extra $10 for their name.

Llama,
If I’ve got all of my data backed up, and all of my programs are on CD (except AH and a few other downloads) is there any reason not to move to XP now? (I don’t care about my settings too much because I fear that some files may be corrupt.) I keep things pretty simple and mostly just run AH and Office programs.

I’ve kind of been waiting for this machine to take a bad virus hit or lose it’s hard drive, and then upgrade to XP.

As far as the graphics card fan goes, it looks like a one of a kind. I cleaned the old fan last night, and it started working, but not well. I think that I could Jerry-rig a generic 2 ¼ “ CPU fans over the existing heat sink and tap into one of the extra sets of power wires coming out of the power supply. I think that I would pry the old fan off first, it looks like its glued to the heat sink. Bad idea in general?

eskimo

llama · « **Reply #6 on:** October 03, 2004, 09:05:17 PM »

Eskimo,

If you have good backups of your personal data, then now would be a GREAT time to go to XP. I myself am rarely happy with those systems I have upgraded OSes to over the years. Fresh installs are the way to go when it comes to stability.

As for hard drive brands, there have been times in my life when I was loyal to a particular brand, and I would believe that drives from this vendor were somehow less trouble-prone than other brands, or were more reliable, or were faster, or make other generalizations. (In case you're wondering, that brand was Maxtor.)

Two years ago, I took inventory of all the troubles I had had with my Maxtor drives in my own personal machines, and compared my personal trouble and failure rate to my clients' machines, which had drives from every vendor imaginable. I was surprised to find that I did indeed have occasional compatibility troubles with my Maxtors (mostly related to overclocking the PCI bus) that were really no different than my clients' machines. The failure rate between the major brands was almost identical too. (Minor brands you've never heard of had HUGE early-failure rates. But then again, people don't realize that hard drives are wear items, like tires and brake shoes on a car. The WILL fail eventually, but good ones will be trouble-free for at least 5 years, IMHO. 3 is average.)

Since then, I have really paid attention to features and technological advances more than anything else. 1.5 years ago I bought a pair of 100 gig IDE drives from Western Digital because they had 8 megs of cache while everyone else had 2. They were fast and cheap, and still in use. Despite terrible luck with Seagate SCSI drives 8 years ago (and swearing them off forever) my new computer uses a 200 gig SATA Seagate drive because it runs cooler and quieter than other brands. It is the fastest drive I've yet used.

I guess my point is that every major manufacturer makes pretty good drives, and any one of them can make an occasinoal dud model. These days I buy for Price, Warranty Length (some seagates are 5 years!), internal cache size, noise, and speed. If you don't want to worry about this stuff, then just buy for price, capacity, and maybe warranty length.

As for your video card, what make and model is it? Perhaps we know of a good fan substitute.

-Llama

GunnerCAF · « **Reply #7 on:** October 03, 2004, 10:36:04 PM »

I have been using ME for many years, and it has worked well. About a week ago, I had a lockup and when I rebooted, it would not load windows.

I picked up a 120G hard drive, and WinXP. I loaded XP from scratch, then connected my old 80G drive that was only half used. It is a pain to set everything up again from scratch, but it is easy to access all my data from the other drive.

If the drive is failing, you can just make a folder, and dump the entire drive on your new hard drive. If you upgrade to a larger drive, you most always have plenty of room to do this. It gives you pleny of time to get all your important data from your old drive if you ever need to delete it for more room.

Gunner

beet1e · « **Reply #8 on:** October 04, 2004, 04:14:31 AM »

llama - what's your overall impression of Seagate drives? I have a friend who bought his PC in 1998, and has had HDD failure twice - both times a Seagate.

I'm currently using Maxtors. I have two in my PC, with an OS on each.

Eskimo - To verify the drive, I would start at the utility program provided by the disk manufacturer.

Skuzzy · « **Reply #9 on:** October 04, 2004, 02:06:17 PM »

I'll echo what Llama said about hard drives. Taking it a step further. All IDE/SATA drives you buy should be considered a commodity product. As such, they are all going to be about the same.
The technology in HD's is so blaise' today that it all boils down to the various differences in the parts used to assemble them.

I tend to use Maxtor and Seagate drives.

llama · « **Reply #10 on:** October 04, 2004, 05:52:08 PM »

Quote

Originally posted by beet1e
llama - what's your overall impression of Seagate drives? I have a friend who bought his PC in 1998, and has had HDD failure twice - both times a Seagate.

I'm currently using Maxtors. I have two in my PC, with an OS on each.

Well, to answer your question, I feel good enough about Seagate drives that I bought one for my newest personal machine - a 200 gig SATA. I am pleased how quiet it is and that it is low-heat compared to other drives, and it is plenty fast for me. It also came with a 5 year warranty. That was good enough for me. (My main machine is a "small form factor" SFF PC - you know, those little towers that are 10 inches tall? Heat and noise are important to me in this machine.)

I was recently cleaning out my junk-bin, and uncovered two dead seagate drives - the ones that made me swear off seagate. Hmmm.

As for anecdotal evidence such as "my friend's seagate drives both died, my Maxtors are fine,' well I think everyone reading this board can make a similar statement, but can insert pretty much any two drive manufacturers into the sentence. *I* can make such statements.

Really, what you need are statistics, but no vendor can be trusted here for MTBF (mean time between failures) and other figures. http://www.storagereview.com is where I go for the current, user-reported statistics of current hard drives. (and reviews too).

Storagereview can make statements like this:

According to filtered and analyzed data collected from participating StorageReview.com readers, the Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 is more reliable than 68% of the other drives in the survey that meet a certain minimum floor of participation.

According to filtered and analyzed data collected from participating StorageReview.com readers, the Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 's predecessor ( Seagate Barracuda ATA V ) is more reliable than 95% of the other drives in the survey that meet a certain minimum floor of participation.

because of such user-reporting over time.

Yes, this is not really scientific (only computer experts are self-reporting) but it is still not a bad way to avoid a very failure-prone model.

Anyway, back to the video card fan question...

-Llama

beet1e · « **Reply #11 on:** October 05, 2004, 02:02:44 AM »

Quote

Originally posted by llama
I was recently cleaning out my junk-bin, and uncovered two dead seagate drives - the ones that made me swear off seagate. Hmmm.

As for anecdotal evidence such as "my friend's seagate drives both died, my Maxtors are fine,' well I think everyone reading this board can make a similar statement, but can insert pretty much any two drive manufacturers into the sentence. *I* can make such statements.

Hehe Llama - interesting post, thanks. I think the culprit in many cases (no pun intended) is inadequate cooling, as mentioned by someone else further up. In all probability, the guy with the failed Seagates has a poorly vented case, and Seagates just happened to be in vogue at the time. I am under no illusisons about my Maxtors. They're fairly new right now, so no immediate problems, but I'm ready with my external HDD, and for when that fails I've got other data backups on CDROM.

Speaking of cooling, I just built a new PC for my brother and his family, the main reason being to allow them to upgrade away from WMe. (They had only 128MB of RAM, and I couldn't get any more at reasonable cost - no longer sold - the old SDRAM 168 pin DIMMs) In their old PC, the HDD was simply bolted across the front of the inside of the case. This arrangement allowed for no fan cooling at all! Their new case is one of the ones in which the HDD is inserted horizontally, and I've added the optional 80cm fan mounted vertically to ingest air, passing over the HDD as it enters the case. I hope this will add to the longevity of the HDD. Of course there's also an exhaust fan at the rear of the case.

As for copying their old data onto the new PC HDD, well, the two daughters "dealt with" all their private data - most likely emails from boyfriends etc. - and I was told the only data they wanted to keep was in two folders, plus all email data. So I just installed their old HDD in the new PC in addition to their new HDD, copied the two folders across, and for Outlook simply imported the .PST file. I left the old HDD in there at the time, just in case they realised there was other data needed. Otherwise that old HDD is not used - should I take it out for any reason?

eagl · « **Reply #12 on:** October 05, 2004, 02:25:17 PM »

The fan on my GF4-4200 stopped working so I found a $30 aftermarket copper heatsink/fan to replace it. It works like a champ, cools better than the stock one did. Many video cards have aftermarket heatsink/fan options that usually cost less than a new card. If you kill your old card in the heatsink swapout, then that's a great excuse to get a new card

Or if you're still under warranty, send the sucker back to the manufacturer and see what they send you in return. Sometimes you get a free upgrade when returning older cards because they simply don't have the old ones in stock anymore so they have to send you a newer replacement. A dead fan on an otherwise working card is usually a good reason to RMA the card.

llama · « **Reply #13 on:** October 05, 2004, 06:24:16 PM »

Beet1e,

Well, keeping the unused drive connected and powered on all the time is not a BIG deal, but I would disconnect it (and reconnect it only when it was needed) just to keep it cool and ready to use should a need arise.

It sure would suck if you needed to use that drive one day, and it was dead because it had overheated last year...

-llama

eskimo2 · « **Reply #14 on:** October 10, 2004, 11:01:06 AM »

Thanks guys,

I bought the 80 GB Seagate HD and all is well. I put in XP home as well.
Pretty much all of my troubles are gone except my CH input devices are not recognized.

eskimo