Hard Drives

[ChrisIMRIE]

Hey Guys,

Left PC on last night due to downloads which i wanted to have in the morning, i've done this before so it was no biggy.

Woke up 8AM to the pc, turned tft on and was greeted with BIOS saying hard drive missing.

I was a bit worried to say the least, so powered it off, left it for 5minutes, turned back on to be greeted by what sounded like every fan in the case doing like 5000RPM, the noise created was astounding, never heard anything like it before, was like a vacuum cleaner infact.

It has never done this before...

Is it a sign that hard drives are on there way out when they just go missing in the BIOS?

And anyone have any ideas why my fans went crazy?

Chris,

 

[Ian]

No idea what happened there, but all the fans may have come on as the system may have been really hot. I presume everything works fine now though?

Just to be sure, back everything up, but it could be just "one of those things". Hard drives can mess up sometimes, as if they are very cold they may not be detected in time by the BIOS (sounds strange, but happened to one of my old SMART drives ages ago).

 

[psd99]

Chris,

try downloading a harddisk monitoring tool i think its called smart scan
see if it pics nething up

that sounds quite scary!

but yes like admin said back up ur data and be safe rather than sorry!

 

[ChrisIMRIE]

Things have gotten worse,


I tried powering it on again before coming to college and it will NOT power on, seems completely dead, i checked the UPS status on the laptop (using software) and there have been no surges/spikes at all.

No power loss, nothing, but now the whole system won't boot up,

And just to inform y'all im using laptop on WLAN, just really pi**ed off at the moment, as it's only a few months old, going to tinker with it tonight, get the whole lot in bits and make sure everything is how it should be.

Chris,

 

[psd99]

im not sure if ur talking abt your desktop here
but if so:

sounds like its your psu
if theres no lights or power, check your psu make sure its connected up properly
could be looking at a bad psu

ups- no not the delivery service
Uninterupted Power Supply!!

lol

is the thing heavy? how much did it cost?
id like one of these things!

 

[Me__2001]

is the thing heavy? how much did it cost?
id like one of these things!

overclockers.co.uk sell them, a resonable size one would cost around £100 or more depending on the power it can supply

 

[ChrisIMRIE]

Right news update...

It now boots up, which is good news, although more problems follow as below.

Windows XP Pro takes approximately 5minutes to load.

I open Windows Media Player 10 to play some music, the music is scratchy and skips quite a lot.

If i also open Internet Explorer while i have windows media player open, the music slows right down and goes really slo-mo.

It's either a read problem from the HDD or the CPU is utterly buggered and isn't processing things fast enough, all of this worked last night before i went to bed so something bad has happened.

Any ideas now people???

Chris

 

[psd99]

good news its back on

id say its ur harddrive too

check ur ide cable
make sure its connected properly to both mobo and harddrive!

 

[ChrisIMRIE]

Its a SATA caddie, and a SATA drive, both of which are spanking new, well the hard drive is from PCWORLD (sigh...)

Im about to give the inside a quick service to check for nasties and im going to put the hdd in without the caddie...

 

[Ian]

Have you tried running chkdsk? Be sure to back everything up!

 

[Cache-man]

sounds like a harddisk error to me, although it could be any number of things. Try installing your HDD into another computer, and try playing your music files from it there. Also, as mentioned previously..backup your disk, just in case! Try Chkdsk

 

[ChrisIMRIE]

Hard Drive has been backed up, been inside the pc and it's quite warm to be honest.

The hard drive has been removed from the removable caddie and placed internally into a 3.5" bay.

No change, still the same old problems as before.

No idea whether to scrap the lot and rebuild, because if i buy a new hard drive and it turns out its not the hard drive thats faulty, i will be stuck with a useless hard drive.

I don't know if its the CPU but the slo-ness of music got me thinking whether it might be pointing to the CPU.

Chris

 

[psd99]

chris

how about reseating the CPU?

when ur music plays and it stutters
do u notice that your ide light on your case is constantly lighted up?


i used to get a problem similar to yours when i was running xp on a pentium 1!
as soon as id play a song wallop!!!
it would FREEZE!

 

[ChrisIMRIE]

I just did a low level format (level 0) on the hard drive and then followed that by a clean installation of Win Xp Pro.

Seems to have done the job, don't know what happened to be honest, but all i know is that a clean reinstall and format did the trick...

Just copying things back over from the DVD backups now.

Touch wood this never happens again...

Cheers for all your help guys, appreciate it.

Chris,

 

[psd99]

no worries


lovely jubly!

glad to hear its sowted!

 

[ChrisIMRIE]

Yeah im glad it's fixed aswell,

No idea what happened, hard drive might of corrupted, but all seem'd well last night, haven't used the PC today as im at college.

But i hope thats the last of the problems...

 

[ChristopherP]

So all fine and dandy then?

 

[ChrisIMRIE]

Indeed,

Where are you then Postill, at home?