Is my HDD Dead?

[ziru]

There seems to be a problem with my HDD not being recognized in the BIOS. I woke up today to find my PC at a black screen after hearing some odd clicks before going to sleep the night before. On a reboot, my computer lists nothing under the IDE drives, but it seems to list my HDD on the next screen under RAID devices. Booting up my manufacter utils, it gave me a SMART failure. I'm at a point now where I don't know what to try next and am wondering if I should just RMA now. Thanks in advance for any help/insight.

 

[AlexStenka]

specs?

 

[MrE]

Open your case, power down and power up your machine. Listen to the hard disk as it spins up. If you hear a clicking noise on spin up, its usually a sign of a head crash. Then yes, it would be RMA time.

-E

 

[linderman]

hello:



donwload and run your hard drive maker's diagnostic utility (free) run the full diangostic test

sounds like an waiting RMA to me.

 

[ethos747474nikon8989]

The easy way to tell if you can get to another computer is to put your hard drive into another computer as a slave hard drive.

If it is dead windows won't even see it and won't show up in My Computer.

If it's damaged windows will run check disk on it automaticly and you can see how many sectors are unreadable. If not everything is bad you could run Getdataback and recover some of it.

If the problem isnt your hard drive it will just show up in My Computer and you can rule it out as the problem and keep troubleshooting from there.

Remember to move the jumper on the hard drive if your booting it up as a slave on a different computer.

 

[davidlem]

Open your case, power down and power up your machine. Listen to the hard disk as it spins up. If you hear a clicking noise on spin up, its usually a sign of a head crash. Then yes, it would be RMA time.

-E

More often than not, clicking is not a sign of a head crash. There are dozens of other internal diagnostic failures that will cause the read/write assembly to sweep from stop to stop repeatedly. It *could* mean a head crash, yes. But this isn't often the case.

 

[davidlem]

The easy way to tell if you can get to another computer is to put your hard drive into another computer as a slave hard drive.

If it is dead windows won't even see it and won't show up in My Computer.

If it's damaged windows will run check disk on it automaticly and you can see how many sectors are unreadable. If not everything is bad you could run Getdataback and recover some of it.

If the problem isnt your hard drive it will just show up in My Computer and you can rule it out as the problem and keep troubleshooting from there.

Remember to move the jumper on the hard drive if your booting it up as a slave on a different computer.

Don't let Windows run checkdisk on it unless you want mangled data (assuming you can get anything from it at all).

 

[MrE]

More often than not, clicking is not a sign of a head crash. There are dozens of other internal diagnostic failures that will cause the read/write assembly to sweep from stop to stop repeatedly. It *could* mean a head crash, yes. But this isn't often the case.

True, but it is the most common form of the "click of death". But, it could also be a bad spin up chip on the PCB, or an actulator failure (stictation?), bearing failure , etc... I was just passing along the general idea that its a hardware issue.

-E