Hard disk failure

Hello everyone.

I had recently bought a 160GB hard disk a few months ago, one day I came back to my computer to hear it making very strange noises indeed. When I tryed to use it I found that it had frozen, so when I restarted it is continued to make very strange clunking noises and windows would not boot although sometimes randomly it would work fine then after a few hours it would crash again with the clunking soundtrack droning from within the box.

I put two and two together realising that it must be a hard disk failure, I opened the box and removed the disk, my computer now works fine again. Since the disk is under the manufacturer's warranty I am going to have to take it back to the shop from which I bought it.

But first I want to copy some files from the hard disk and then delete some things before returning the disk to the shop. I've got a laptop to which I was going to temporarily store the files but I'm not too sure how I will be able to carry this out, what cables I need or if it is even possible without installing the disk.

Could anyone help?

 

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I'm surprised it crashed your machine, as it evidently isn't your primary drive. Usually in a case like this, you can install it as a slave drive, and see whether it can be accessed at all for data retrieval. From what you're describing though, saving data sounds like a long shot. I've heard tales of putting harddrives in a freezer as a way to temporarily revive them. I've never tried it, but it might be worth a shot. Put it in an anti static bag before you do.

I would check with the drive manufacturers website. They generally have drive diagnostic software free for downloading. Check out the drive yourself, and see what you can find out. Depending on your warranty with the box, it may be faster to RMA the drive directly to the manufacturer. Call your shop first, but your drive warranty may be separate from the box warranty.

 

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This device is a Hitachi, I had it set as device 1 Slave with 16 heads. It could be accessed but randomly as it would crash the machine, this is why I was confused to what drive it was that was faulty.

Ill try to find some drive diagnostic software and see what it finds.

 

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You might be able to fix the problem. It's possible to manipulate a harddrive failure through something like a virus where your harddrive attempts to access consecutive data in a "Jump by Jump" order. It was the same sort of problem with the first magazine CD-ROMS that would place their installation files in the wrong order, so when you were installing something it would cause the CD to Jump because of the heads movement to get the data sequenced and therefore cause the CD-ROM to fail.

So I suggest running a Scandisk on the drive if you can get it to be a Slave with no problems. (Make sure you've decided Manually via the Jumpers which are Slave and Master rather than using Cable Select).

Try fixing it first, it might take a few attempts but its worth the attempt.

 

If it is a 'hardware' failure then no amount of anything is going to work. You can however if you deem it necessary send it off to a company that will pull it apart and reconstruct the data using mind boggling technologies that cost trillions of pounds.
My advice ... just throw the whole thing at the manufacturer. They will see if they can access it using only the most basic of checks (heck this is a business they are trying to run) - if they can access the file structure - they will tell you there is nothing wrong and to check your system config (blag the customer off now quickly, weve got a business to run), if they cant they will chuck it in a bin marked "Equipment We Are Too Shi* To Make Properly In The First Place" and send you out another.
Paranoia - The Enemy of Man

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Its just a gutter that you lose data! Lost ENUFF data in my time cos I was too damn lazy to BACK IT UP before the failure! But life goes on - there are a million hardrives out there waiting to be filled up with more gloop!

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peace

c20

 

I scanned it with drive diagnostic software obtained from the manufacturer's website, it found no errors. When I started the computer today a window popped up saying I had changed a file that could allow the homepage to be altered in my browser. It said;"Did you just change a file? or do you want to view the details?" (Or something to this effect. I clicked no because I had not just changed a file and that was the last I heard from the mysterious application.
I am scanning for viruses just now and Ill scan for adwares after as It appears that this may not be as back and white as I first thought.

Its weird as it appears to fail randomly. As an example I am currently scanning it for virii and hasnt yet crashed, so it may still be possible to fix it or at the very least back up the data thats on it before sending it back to the manufacturer.

Ill keep you guys posted.

 

It sounds as though you may have a browser hijacker. Try CWShredder, http://www.softpedia.com/public/cat/10/17/10-17-150.shtml

You may also want to run Spybot Search and Destroy, http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html

 

What antivirus are you using? Try getting a boot time antivirus for one and using your IDE cable, hook it up to your computer as slave but NOT 'Active'. That way the computer will load Windows on your Active drive and you can simply browse the other HD if possible.

 

I had to deal with hard drive failures, then I got RAID 1 setup with 2 160GB, it a great feeling when a drive fails: you lose nothing, computer works fine, ship the bad warranted drive back, get a new one, put it in, ready for the next failure. And if you have over a 100GB of downloaded movies and crap you never want to lose it trust me

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Right, just backed up the entire disk, it took 4 full DVDs only to find out that it might not actually be a hard disk failure at all. I worked that out after opening the box after it was making the clicking sound and disconnecting the suspect drive only to find out it was coming from my 40GB master.

Restarted and it crashed: this time came the blue screen of death.

It read:

KERNAL_STACK_INPAGE_ERROR

STOP: 0x00000077 (0xC0000185, 0xC0000185,0x00000000, 0x09559000)
Beginning dump of physical memory.

So I restarted it and it came up in DOS with: Operating System not found.

Restarted again to come straight here to tell you guys, obviously its working again but...for how long?

So, Im gonna ring up the shop and see what they are going to do about it. Maybe that warranty will come in handy after all.

 

Thats what those pesky warranties are for

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Try running Memtest86, http://www.memtest86.com/ . If it passes, your memory and motherboard should be in the clear.

 

How did you burn those DVDs if you can't get to Windows?

 

I'm pretty sure it's hardware related. The problem is supposed to either be an issue with the hdd or with RAM, and since this hasn't come up before the new hdd, I doubt it's the RAM. I would keep looking into the antivirus stuff because of that message about changing your homepage, and the fact that the trouble seems to be with the master disk. Anyway, you can read about it at http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=228753

 

You can always use Knoppix to burn everything with K3B. It comes with KDE

 

Try a Scandisk. [Read the post first]

The reason I mentioned it is that I killed my harddrive a couple of days back, it caused it to no longer boot up. The problem was a simple one though, I had been playing some games on the computer that had caused the graphics card to generated a Hardware lockup forcing the system into software mode (enough for a reboot).

Occasionally the lockup though totally rebooted windows.

I found that on one such reboot it took 30 minutes (usually it's about 10 or more times less) to bootup and even then the Antivirus couldn't run etc. What the problem was wasn't the RAM but the CACHING on the drive.

So heres what to do (for XP) to move your CACHE to your better drive:
Right Click "My Computer" and select "Properties".
Click the "Advanced" Tab, then click the "Settings" button.
Click the "Advanced" Tab there, go down to the Virtual Memory settings and click "Change".
Under this new window, make sure your C: Drive (probably the 40Gb drive) has "No Paging" selected. As for your Larger 160Gb drive, assign 1024Mb (usually enough) although if it has a recommended amount use that instead, assign that for both "Initial" and "Maximum" size.

Now you've set this all up make sure you "Apply" and "Ok" it, the system will ask you to restart since you will be replacing the "Paging file" in the sense that it will now be located on another drive.

When the system reboots, use Scandisk on the C Drive to fix any errors, since now it shouldn't create an error with the Paging File by writing to an error section of drive.

 

I could burn DVDs because it failed randomly, don't ask me why, it seemed once it heated it up through use it became unstable as a result I could back up the disk, the wrong one so I still lost everything. ha ha

Thanks for all the help, my hard drive has since failed and I got a new one through warranty.

I've got lots of new problems, as I had to install XP from scratch it had NO updates and was very security flawed, next thing I know the computer is telling me that its gonna shut down in 30 secs... one word: MSBlaster, my computer was literally swimming with virii, worms and trojans.

Just to name a few, MSBlaster, Sasser, Parite (two different versions) among others. I still have a few trojans, one seems to be very new and as a result there is no patch for it yet, it appears as wuraclt.exe in processes. This is the only info I can find on it in English: Wuraclt.exe. The other one appears as rundll.exe and I'm told this is always a virus in XP, AVG wont even find these with the most recent update.

Fun and games...

 

no shit! that's some heated situation!! want to do a format?
my advice -> burn antivirus and firewall* software + windows security updates on a cd
format the damn box
reinstall windows with the network cable plugged out
install the firewall, updates, antivirus
plug the network cable in (plug & pray)

I always do it like it, no virii yet.

*I advice Agnitum Outpost Firewall or Sygate Personal Pro

 

when doing a clean XP install, always install a Software Firewall before attempting to connect to get an Update. (I know it's a bit later but as Avatar suggests burn/copy a program to disk and then reinstall it again to deal with some mess.)

I suggest that Tiny Personal Firewall is good enough just to get you past MSBLAST however you should also get hold of SPYBLASTER since that will change a bunch of registry settings to stop some viruses from being able to install themselves which is extremely useful on a clean install.

 

I just realized how awfully wrong this is.. I mean - Windows... It's supposed to be the one true, leading, monopoly OS, but yet , it's so full of bugs and holes you can not even install it without it going down. I mean.. to any other software this would be a death sentence. and windows is a safety-critical software (an OS!)