Hard disk failure?

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under18carbon

under18carbon

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Recently I heard some clicking noises coming from the hard disk and there was noticeable slowdown when I turned on my PC. The first time I boot Windows, everything takes ages to load and the clicking continues, when I restart the clicking isn't as frequent and everything loads up as usual. This continued for 2 days, and today morning when I tried to turn on my PC it failed.

I get this two messages :

"IDE Channel 1 no 80 conductor cable installed"
"Floppy disk(s) fail (40)"

It gives me an option to press F1 to continue, or Delete to enter the BIOS (?).

When I press F1, I get this :

"A disk read error occured,
Please press ctrl + alt + del to reboot"

:indiff: Any ideas?

EDIT : I'm using XP Pro if it helps...

EDIT : Well, I managed to solve the first two problems (hopefully) and all I'm getting now is the disk read error. Continuously googling and reading online to find a solution... :grumpy: Any ideas? Anyone?
 
I had a laptop do this - an acer laptop (my mates), as soon as i pressed the power button the hard drive would just click, i tried my hard drive from my HP laptop and it booted up fine, so it does sound like its the same problem my mate had :(
 
Yeah, your diagnosis is correct. Drive has physically failed. Buy a new drive and install Windows onto it, then connect your dead drive as a slave, and you might be able to recover it. If not, there are an abundance of cheap utilities on the web that will try to recover disk contents for you. I recently used R Studio, for a cost of around $50 US. It recovered the entire contents of a disk which Windows would see, but wouldn't even get basic size information from.

Best of luck.
 
I decided to just reformat and do a fresh install of XP, and so far its working fine. I've got back up of most of my recent work, so its okay I suppose! I read on from one of the various pages I stumbled upon on Google, they mentioned that part of the problem I described earlier could also be the fault of faulty connectors/cables (easiest possible solution). I think I'm going to replace the IDE cable and run more tests on the current hard disk. So far there has been no clicking whatsoever. Plus I also removed my floppy drive and disabled it as well (don't need it anymore anyway!)...

Thanks for the input everyone. :)
 
under18carbon
I decided to just reformat and do a fresh install of XP, and so far its working fine. I've got back up of most of my recent work, so its okay I suppose! I read on from one of the various pages I stumbled upon on Google, they mentioned that part of the problem I described earlier could also be the fault of faulty connectors/cables (easiest possible solution). I think I'm going to replace the IDE cable and run more tests on the current hard disk. So far there has been no clicking whatsoever. Plus I also removed my floppy drive and disabled it as well (don't need it anymore anyway!)...

Thanks for the input everyone. :)
Click to expand...

So maybe it just became really corrupted? You may want to get a program that checks your HDD health and can predict when it will go out. It may be more likely to fail again.
 
Sorry to resurrect a thread from the dead, but I think I am having a similar problem on one of my drives.

I have a Seagate 120 GB 7200 RPM drive that shows up in XP Pro and seems to be functioning for the most part. In recent weeks I have heard a clicking sound coming from my computer and assumed it to be a bad fan, but now I suspect the drive as going because I heard one of my drives spin up and down while I was playing a cpu intensive PC game.

Also, when I run Linux based drive utilities on it ranging from Seagate's Drive Utilities program, Active Partion, to iolo's Drive Mechanic they either lock up when performing file structure tests or give me an error on the drive. When I launch Active Partition, it gives "Error reading partition table Drive 2 Sector 0" after running -InitDisk to mount my drives before the utility is launched.

As a precaution, I have backed up the contents of the drive on to another hard drive that is in good condition. Would simply reformatting the drive fix this problem or is the drive possibly about to crash?
 
Matrixhasu77
Would simply reformatting the drive fix this problem or is the drive possibly about to crash?
Click to expand...

Based on my previous experience, reformatting it worked only for a few days, and then the clicking sounds kept coming back. I was not able to even turn on my PC, it would continuosly reboot. Since then I've bought a new hard disk.

I would say that yes, there is a posibility that your drive is about to crash.
 

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