HD troubles, but thumping it helps >: )

Please bear with me - I'm loosing my patience with my PC now -

I have 3 HDs in my PC - one Sata running XP and 2 older IDE drives for storage, games etc...

A while back when one of the IDE drives was the main drive it made some loud clunking sounds and the PC locked up. It seemed OK after that but I bought the sata drive because I didn't want to lose everything.

Over the past few days the PC has been freezing up, pausing for a few minutes, sometimes resuming. If a hard reset is required, XP scandisk finds lots of bad crap and takes an age to sort it etc..., but I don't know if the HD is bad or if it's just the junk Windows left around when it was reset. A full WinXP scandisk said the main sata drive was fine.

Last night it locked solid again - I was SOOOOOOO annoyed I thwacked the case quite hard - and it came back to life again as if nothing had happened. Very odd. I assume one of the HDs is locking up, but which one???

I am tempted to buy a brand new large drive and throw all the old ones away, to remove the problem completely. But it seems a shame to chuck a smallish sata drive that might be OK and could be used for disposable stuff like games etc..

So -

1. am I likely to knacker a new drive if the old drive (as a slave) dies / locks-up etc..?

2. can anyone recommend a decent (pref. free) utility that can run low-level HD tests, mark bad clusters etc...?

You won't break a new drive by attaching it to another drive that's got a faulty head, unless the fault in the drive is a power-linked one. :P

Get a new drive ASAP, i ran on a locking drive for a good 3 months once, before i knew about the hardware. I then lost everything. Oh how i miss Total Sonic :)

I don't think you can low-level anything these days.

First of all, is your SATA drive running NTFS? If not, convert it immediately.

Secondly, check your RAM to see if that works.

Thirdly check the temperature your computer is running at. While most will survive running at 60C, less is better.

Lastly check that your PSU is powerful enough, and still supply the correct voltsges.

Faulty harddrives (as-in virtual memory errors) cause STOP errors (BSOD), not 'locking up' errors. That's usually a temperarture, RAM/PSU or driver issue.

I got lock-ups. It doesn't give up immediately, but only after a few seconds/minutes of trying to access the drive and failing :)

Yeah, that's exactly what happens - the computer sits there accessing the drives, trying to load. Sometimes it finds what it was after and continues as normal, sometimes not.

It recovered immediately after being thumped, so I suspect the fault does lie with one of the drives rather than a temp or power problem.

Also, I've not changed the computer's hardware config for about 3 years, so I doubt I can be experiencing a power or temp prob. now - I would have had it earlier.

It is running NTFS, yes.

Thanks all for your advice. I shall buy a new HD straight away.

I'm going to go for a 300GB sata Seagate Barracuda (about £80 from Dabs) unless anyone's had bad experiences with them?

Hard drive lockups can cause pausing, usually it would mean its a non system disk (does not contain the paging file).

If the SATA disk contains your system partition (the C:\ drive), then simply disconnect the others for a day or two and see if the problem dissapears.

If it does, reconnect one and see if it reappears, if not connect the next one.

Either way your introducing one drive at a time to check the problem out.

As flameduck said though, there are other options but I have certainly seen the behaviour you describe being thre result of a disk.

Totally off topic BTW but flameduck if you read this, I could not help noticing your comment on NZ broadband, do I take this to mean you have moved from Denmark to NZ??? As a New Zealander, (living now in Australia), I'm just intrigued if that is the case what prompted the move.

Cheers

Roger.

Good advice there Roger, thanks - I am going to order the new drive anyway (time to ditch IDE for good I think) so I'll remove both the old IDE drives tonight and see how the computer runs for the next few days while I wait for the new drive to be delivered. If it's fine I'll keep the current sata drive as a slave.

Not permanently, no. The move was prompted primarily by an opertunity presenting itself, and I figured it would be good working down here a couple of months.

Not that particular drive, no. I would recommend you get a decent IBM/Hitachi drive instead tho'. Never had a problem with them, and it's hard to beat a five year warranty.

I had bad hard drive clicking problems and resets/lockups a while ago and a new (better) PSU sorted it. The HD was actually losing power whilst trying to read/write ... ouch.

That's not necesarily the case -- power supply's definitely can wear out over time, and can have difficulty sustaining the same power flow they had originally. I've seen several 'go bad', all of them very slowly. One of them started fluctuating the voltage on the 12-volt line (up to almost 16 volts at one point), which made the system more nad more unstable. Another one simply started cutting out for very short periods.

As far as cooling is concerned: even with everything being equal, fans work less and less effectively over time as well (due to dust build-up, bearings wearing down, and generally getting 'sticky'. They spin slower and slower over the years, cooling less and less. Less cooling means higher temperatures, which can adversely affect your overall system.

Anyway, the 'thumping it and it spins up again' most likely indicates a problem with one of the drives itself. It could be that the spinner motor is wearing out (it's a mechanical part, after all!), or that the bearings are failing and it takes too much power to get the drive to start spinning up.
I also had similar problems myself in the past which appeared to be caused by an Adaptec IDE RAID controller that was dieing on me -- switching it to a different card made all the problems go away. I guess technically it's possible that your on-board IDE controller is dieing as well... wouldn't rule it out, at least.

Lastly, did you happen to reinstall your OS recently? I've seen similar problems occur under windows when I hadn't installed the motherboard IDE busmastering drivers. Things seemed to work 'just fine' for the most, but when trying to copy things from one HD to another was horrible, leading to massive slowdowns, lock-ups and sometimes even BSOD's. If you haven't already done so, make sure you have your busmastering drivers installed!

If you suspect that your PSU may be the issue, there are programs that can monitor its voltage outputs and temperatures among others. A free download is MBM5 (motherboard monitor 5), which works with the vast majority of motherboards out there.

I'd also be suspicious of one of the HD's itself being on its last legs. you really should make sure you have backups of all your important data. One thing you can do to help narrow it down (depending on how often these lock-ups occur, of course) is to temporarily copy all data from one of the IDE drives to a folder on your SATA drive, and unplug the IDE drive in question. If the instability disappears as well, then you find your likely culprit.

I have a dead 250GB seagate barracuda that I bought only a year and a half ago. Not very pleased about it.

Right, I speak with experience here - I posted a similar problem on the forums recently.

My hard-drive was making funny beeping/booping noises like an arcade machine. The PC was freezing and this was at no particular times - and the freezing problem make continue for a long time or short periods whereby the PC was useable for a few minutes, then lock up for a few minutes then free up again.

I went as far as purchasing Spin-Rite - one of the most respected hard-drive utilities in the world.

Spin-Rite couldn't find a problem. There were no hard disk errors, I couldn't find a thing.

So, I farted about with the cables and it seems to be okay - I predict that some of the wires inside the cable are broken and I prop the cable to the hard-drive up with a piece of plastic. Maybe when a PC is sealed up and switched on - the heat building up can be enough to move a broken wire enough to break the connection. Anyway, I resolved my similar problem and I have a super-duper PC again.

Seagates have a five year warranty, too. I got a couple for Christmas.

Heh, That Spin-Rite looks nice Puki! Also kind of looks like Antony did all the wording!!!! :P

Well, I ordered a Maxtor DiamondMax10 instead, as it was PCZone's best buy. A 250gb 7200rpm sata one I think. The Seagate was their second-best buy. Took the plunge and ordered a 6600GT as well :)

Now I just need a new processor fan as mine is making a horrible noise. Are there certain different fan fittings on Intel boards? I have a P4 2.4 on an MSI Neo2 mainboard.

Yeah, there are. You can probably check which motherboard you have (and thus which type of socket it's equiped with) using a program like Everest.

Then visit your favorite PC spare parts sales place, and buy whatever Zalman Copper/Aluminium haetsink they have.

Just discovered it's the chipset fan that's making the terrible noise, so I need to get a new one of those instead of a CPU fan - much easier to swap at least, and cheaper.