Hard drive gone?

[dlrsuperman]

I was playing everquest and listening to winamp. All of a sudden, I hear the winamp sound looping. While the sound is looping I heard, (what must have been my hard drive) go CLICK CLICK CLICK then it rattled. I quickly shut off my cpu. Then I tried to boot, and it just went to a blinking cursor for 15 min. I tried to boot again, and it found nothing on primary master. And everytime I boot, the hard drive clicks. Is it screwed, or is there any hope?

 

[dlrsuperman]

There was also a strange burning smell coming from my cpu.

 

[bacillus]

<< . I tried to boot again, and it found nothing on primary master >>


I assume that this is in bios! check the ide cable but it sounds very much like its died!

 

[ukDave]

i had a similar problem with the CLICK CLICK CLICKING but my system did not freeze and i immediatly shutdown. It was fine after that with no bad sectors o anything. However, your has gone that bit further and is most deffinately dead. How old is the drive? If it's a young'un, time to RMA>

 

[MrBond]

Clicking drive almost always equals failure. I've gotten a few of them going long enough to preform a ghost to another drive, but it's difficult to do.

Pull the drive out, hook another one up to it that you can ghost to, and make sure you have a bootable floppy and a copy of ghost on a flopy. When you power on the system, hold the drive at different angles each time. I've gotten them to work flipping them over, setting them sideways, etc. When and if it does show up in the POST, DO NOT MOVE IT!! Get into ghost and clone that failing drive. It helps to have someone there, and make sure you're comfortable. Cause if youre holding the drive at an angle that makes it impossible to prop it up, you might be there a while.

Before you attempt the ghost, you might want to call the drive manufacture and get an RMA. Ask them to cross ship a new one to you. They'll need a credit card number, but it won't be charged. If they ask for an error code, tell them it's clicking and will not POST. You should have the new one in a couple days (WD sends them airborne express) and you can attempt a ghost to that one if you have no other drive. (this will only work if the drive is <3yrs old)

Good luck.

 

[slipperyslope]

Good advice MrBond. I do that all the time at work when professors come in saying that all their work in on this hard drive and they have no backups. Of course I let them know that having no backups is the DUMBEST thing you can do. If you can't get it to post by holding it at different angles, sometimes tapping it on the side when it starts clicking also works.

Jim

 

[MrBond]

Slipperyslope, Yep, lack of backups is a huge problem. It just isn't done anymore. At a university setting, I'm surprised they dont' have a central file server with storage for each user that gets backed up nightly. We have 340GB on the file server here, and I save everything to that.

I need to either get anothe drive at home, or buy a tape device. I've got enough stuff that I really don't want to have to redownload.

 

[slipperyslope]

Well each teacher gets 100MB's on a server but not many professors use it. I am also amazed that teachers think that zip disks are safe. I recommend that all the teachers backup to cd when they have that available which most do have now. I have had many teachers lose data on zip disk. I would never trust floppy or zip disks.

Jim

 

[Igore]

i had the same problem on a hdd on a computer at my old job (2 yrs ago?). it ended up being a virus (some sort of worm i think). this also had a sort of burning smell too....although i don't know why. i couldn't fix it but i brought it to a friend of a friend of a ...etc... and he removed the worm and we ghosted the drive to a new one. then all was fine. i am not saying this is your problem, but is a possiblity. hope this helps.

ig

 

[Igore]

DELETE

 

[dlrsuperman]

How would you check if it was a virus that caused it to fail? This drive was only a 6 months old. I can't believe that it failed, I lost so much stuff. It is a Quantum Fireball AS POS. I have never seen a hard drive fail that fast. Do you guys know what could cause that? I hope I can prevent this from ever happening again, because its caused me so much stress. Was it running too hot? Is it from shutting down wrong? One thing I used to do was plug in my power cord and my cpu would partially power up and then down because of a eletricity surge. Did this have anything to do with it?

 

[dlrsuperman]

But I will try cloning it with ghost, I have a friend to help, thanks guys.