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Hard drive broken?


Marcin541

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On my older machine, i installed a new hard drive not that long ago. Well, its been around half a year now, but that doesnt matter. Anyway, its a old 7200 rpm Maxtor 20gb hard drive. The problem with it is the case for the computer is a bit small, so its not really screwed onto anything, and i put it into my spare CD-ROM drive slot. Anyway, recently (2 days ago) the computer has been randomly freezing and unfreezing for no aparent reason. First thing i thought was spyware, but there hasnt been anything downloaded on it in sometime now. Its is basically used for office work and web browsing. Today, i got pretty angry and turned off every possible program from msconfig to make sure nothing that booted made it slow. It didnt work. I took the PC apart, cleaned out the dust, and turned it back on, and noticed everytime it froze I was getting wierd sounds coming out of my hard drive (the new 20 gb one) that sounded sort of like a 56k modem dialing, and the hard drive light is solid green. I unplugged the hard drive, tried different wires, switched its position inside the case, I did every possible thing, but it would still freeze up.

Oh I forgot to mention it freezes when I am opening winamp, it takes about 1 min for it to actually unfreeze and open it up.

I tried doing a scandisk on the drive, and it gets through phase 1 without a problem, then starts freezing up at phase 2 and doesnt complete it. I defragmented it about 3 times now, checked for viruses, and still nothing.

My guess is there is somethingh wrong with the harddrive itself. It seems to have problems reading/writing at some parts of the disk o.O.

my next step is to pop the windows cd in again and format it to see if that works... if not bye bye 20 gb hard drive, hello 10 gb :).

Any suggestions?

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the only program that might help is spinrite http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm

if that doesnt do anything then the drive is dead

That isnt exactly what I would have thought or recommended... But that might work.  I was thinking more like the Ultimate Bootcd available here: http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/index.html

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That isnt exactly what I would have thought or recommended... But that might work.  I was thinking more like the Ultimate Bootcd available here: http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/index.html

ive actually never seen anyone help a harddrive with the Ultimate Boot cd. But spinrite does amazing things, i run it like once ever 6 months and it fixes a ton of stuff.

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