Possible Hard Drive Failure

[sprude27]

How will I know or what are some of the signs, that would let me know my hard drive was failing? My system continues to freeze up for no apparent reason. No hardware conflicts in the Device Manager, more than enough memory.

Is there a test of some kind to determine the condition of a hard drive?

Thanks for any Help

StephenPrude
ClearVision Advertising

 

[edfair]

Scandisk, defrag. Is the drive activity light remaining on. If not, then probably other than hard drive. Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.com

Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply.

Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[tlcscousin]

Could try the ctrl-alt del and see what is listed as not responding. Or go to msconfig and stopping some of the stuff running on boot. Here is two good sites for tweaks and list of what should be left running.

http://www2.whidbey.net/djdenham/Tweekz.htm

http://www2.whidbey.net/djdenham/

 

[Telsa]

When is the last time you did a total reload of the OS (assuming Windows) on the drive? Windows needs to be reloaded about once a year to keep it in optimum shape.

When your drive starts to fail, the clues I found were usually files missing or becoming corrupted... especially the OS.

Sounds like the first step is to run scan disk and then defrag... but in Safe Mode. If that doesn't fix the problems, might want to think about backing up your data and reloading the OS.

Mary )

 

[CitrixEngineer]

It's possible that this is a heat-related issue, especially if the system is AMD-based. Some systems come with heat-monitoring software to check for this.

If this is the case, try smearing some additional heatsink compound on the processor fan, or maybe upgrade the fan.

Another thing that could be causing this is applications that do not free up memory resources correctly. One of the worst offenders for this is Microsoft Internet Exlorer.

The test for this is whether you notice a "freeze" when using a certain application or combination of applications.

If it happens after a certain period of time, then it could be a power management setting. It could be worth disabling it in the BIOS.

Hope this helps

 

[swayda]

Hi. Locking up is a normal condition for Windows. If your drive were actually failing you'd be getting read/write error messages. Try this, go to a command prompt and type the following

scandisk /fragment system.dat

You'll get a return message, write it down, then type

scandisk /fragment user.dat

Write that down then post both here. Don Swayser
swayser@optonline.net