Is my hard drive dying?

[scott]

My hard drive is a little over 2 years old and is about 1/3 full. It has been making strange popping noises lately. Also sometimes when my system is booting it will restart while the OS is loading. I have also been getting more error messages than usual. Today I couldn't get Internet Explorer to display a web page without crashing. Also winmgmt.exe and userinit failed to load once. Restarting solved both of these problems. I ran scandisk. After I did this I couldn't make a network connection and I got a invalid access to memory location when I viewed network information on the system control panel. I ran fixboot to fix that problem. Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks

[sbp]

It does appear the hard drive is on the way out.

[Speedfreak]

Originally posted by scott
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks

Buy a new one before you lose you stuff. ;)

[scott]

How do I convince dell to send me a new Hard Drive? My computer came with windows 98, but I put 2000 on it so they won't support me.

[revil]

don't tell them that you are running 2000. it's a hardware problem, not a software problem

[sbp]

Right revil. Dell might try the same crap like they did in this thread.
http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?threadid=33585886

[Jeffbx]

There are diagnostics that you can download from the drive mfr that will tell you straight up if your drive is bad. Check who made your drive (WD, IBM, Maxtor, etc.) & go to their website. Surf around to find their diag tools & download them. Usually, when you run the program it will create a bootable floppy with the diag program on it. Boot with that floppy & run the diags - if the drive is bad, it will not only tell you that, but it will give you a diagnostics code.

At this point, call Dell, tell them your hard drive is dead & give them the code from the diag tool. I've done this several times, and as long as you give them this info up front, they won't even ask any more questions, they'll just ship you a replacement drive.

[scott]

I ran IBM's diagnostic tool and there were no errors. What else could have caused the problems I listed? Do I need to reinstall windows? The only change I made before I got all the errors was changing my cd burner from master to slave, and my dvd from slave to master.

[sbp]

Speaking of IBM hard drives.

75GXP class-action suit filed.
http://www.tech-report.com/onearticle.x/3035
http://www.storagereview.com/

[Bandito]

Yes it sounds like the drive is failing--all good advice in the previous posts.

But why???

If your power supply is whacked out and sending too much current the hard drive will go *pop* *pop* *pop*. The hard drive is among the first fatalities in a bad power supply.

I would at least check it out before wasting everything else. BTW I would react fairly quickly--the motor is probably pretty close to dying.

[ziggie216]

Originally posted by Bandito
Yes it sounds like the drive is failing--all good advice in the previous posts.

But why???

If your power supply is whacked out and sending too much current the hard drive will go *pop* *pop* *pop*. The hard drive is among the first fatalities in a bad power supply.

I would at least check it out before wasting everything else. BTW I would react fairly quickly--the motor is probably pretty close to dying.

are you serious about the bad power supply? all of my WD hd has never lived though it's max life time. I even had one that died out in less than 2 years, swap it out (manufacture warrenty), died again w/ in less than a year, and screw up again. that one died out atlease 5-6 time. I have a few more hd that are WD and are dead. Nice collection I got here. Well no more WD! The wierd thing is that some of these HD I barly use it. I only use it for file storage.

[K2]

can u say format? :D

[Jeffbx]

Originally posted by ziggie216


are you serious about the bad power supply? all of my WD hd has never lived though it's max life time.

Yes it's true - likely bad power, not bad drives.

Could be bad from your power supply to the MB, or could be from the wall to the power supply. Might want to think about getting a UPS w/a power conditioner, have your wiring checked out, or replace your power supply.