Failing drive?

N

natpond

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 11, 2004
Messages
162
so, i think one of my drives is starting to fail. randomly... usually sometime after my computer has been on for several hours, but beyond that randomly, i hear an intermittant clicking sound, as if the drive is seeking very fast, probably 10 times, about 2 seconds in between, adn then my computer just freezes. picture frozen. would this be a hard drive failure?
Keep in mind im not sure if the clickign is from a hard drive or not, im having trouble pinpointing it in my case, but to me it sounds like a quick seek.

Nat
 
I'm pretty sure it's your harddrive dying. Backup all the info you want and get yourself a new HD.
 
lame. any way for me to find out which one? i have 5. is it probably the oldest of the bunch?
 
i can't think of any way to test out which harddrive is dying except connecting each one of them and boot from it. The one that gives you a hang time is the one you need to replace.
 
i found which one... my boot, duh... thats why it was freezing. when i heard the clicking sound i just felt every drive, and lo and behold, the boot (raptor) was vibrating a little whenever it clicked. RMA-ing it to WD now.
 
glad you found out which drive it was. Hope everything works out fine for you now.
 
Ya that clicking is the read/write heads smacking off the inside of the cylinder and back. LUCKILY you did a good diag and caught it. For future reference download your drive test utils from all the drive makers you have, they usually always get the clunkin in an extended test. :)

 
natpond said:
i found which one... my boot, duh... thats why it was freezing.
Click to expand...
On a Windows NT/2k/XP/2k3 box unless you've got swap on another drive & that drive goes out, a bum disk other than the system drive usually just results in crashing apps or errors opening files and a pile of error & warning messages in the even logs.
Unix systems behave similarly, though they're less likely to totally freeze unless an in-use swap file/partition goes bad. Stuff that's already in ram and running keeps going, but any time a disk access attempt to a dead disk happens that process just hangs. One of my friends had a 486 running Linux that was serving as a router & firewall. One day he tried to log into it & couldn't, but he was busy so he just decided he'd come back to it later. A few months later he gets around to plugging in a monitor, and the screen was covered in disk error messages. It'd been running w/o a HD and happily routing packets for several months. This was at work a few years ago, so he just left it running until he'd gotten another older machine configured to do the job of the machine that was missing its disk.
 
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