This is really bugging me. Yesterday, while listening to an mp3, the song suddenly froze and my D: drive made this nasty grinding, clicking sound, which lasted until I hit STOP on WinAmp. Shut down some applications, played the mp3 again. Same thing happened, at the EXACT same point in the song. Repeated several times.
Shut down & reboot. Before Windows launches, I get a warning that I might have bad sectors on my drive. Uh-oh.
Speedisk runs automatically. For SIX FREAKING HOURS it runs! No bad sectors found…or if they were, Norton didn’t tell me. Win98 launches. I play the mp3 again. No problem at all. Run Speedisk again (briefly). No bad sectors appear on the map.
So what’s the deal, you stupid computer?? Do I have bad sectors or don’t I?
About this noise, it’s been happening for quite some time, at random intervals and often when I’m doing nothing but hanging out online or playing Solitaire, and I never gave it much thought. No previous problems on either hard drive (in fact, I’ve never had a major HD problem in my life, except for viruses.) The drive in question (D:) is a non-system IDE Western Digital 10GB about 2 years old, no idea if it’s still under warranty. Mostly used for games and, more recently, mp3 storage. (It’s about 99.5% full.) Although all my critical files are on C:, losing this drive would still be catastrophic.
I don’t know what’s wrong with your HD, but speaking as someone who has had more then their fair share of computer problems in the last 6 months (the only original parts I still have are the processor and one of the HD), I offer this advice:
Buy another hard drive and transfer everything to it. Then you can have your other one checked out by someone who knows more about the things without having a case of the twitches break out when they tell you it needs to be reformatted.
J.E.T., if the drive in question is actually two years old, it may very well be under factory warranty. I’ve had several replaced by the factory absolutely free, and without proof of purchase. I suggest you take a peek at WD’s web site.
You need to let disk doctor do a few repetitions on full surface scan rather than speed disk. What may be happening is that you’ve got some borderline sectors, and speed disk was able to read the data after multiple attempts, where normal usage isn’t always able to. Depending on how you have it set, Speed disk can get data from sector that normal operating system disk calls cannot.
I second Arden Ranger’s thought to get a new hard drive to back this one up before doing anything more serious to it, but disk doctor should be relatively risk free. It’s likely to take even longer than speed disk did, so best to start it when you won’t be needing your system for a while.
D’oh, I ran Disk Doctor not Speedisk, that’s what I meant to say. I really shouldn’t post after two nights of no sleep. :mad: It took 6 hours under DOS, maybe under Win98 will go faster.
A few repetitions, eh? Yipe. Well, I might have enough free computer time next weekend to try that. What I really want to know is if there’s a problem at all, don’t want to swap out a perfectly good hard drive.
Getting a new HD, just for more storage space, is a foregone conclusion at this point…
Ok, using Norton Disk Doctor, there are a number of surface test options, for thoroughly diagnosing a hard drive that’s occasionally acting up, I would recommend that you have it do at least 2 repetitions, and that it be set for a thorough test rather than a normal test. Make sure it is set to test the entire disk surface rather than just those areas used by files.
Since you’re already decided to get an additional hard drive for additional space, I would suggest that you get the new drive installed, run the above settings on the new drive as well. Never hurts to make sure that your solution’s not gonna cause more problems than you originally had.
If it took six hours that is saying that it was having trouble reading multiple sectorsof the Hard Drive…and that along with the horrible noise is usually a precurser to it failing. I would back everything up NOW!!! You don’t want to lose everything… I have had that happen twice in the past six months, and that really sucks.
Keith
P.S. Most drive manufacturors have an RMA (Return to Manufacturers Authorization) form on their websites.
I have always been told that PCs become troublesome whenever the hard disk space is more than 80-90% utilized. Burn a CD to clear off a GB or so and see if everything runs OK then.
Modern IDE hard drives making hashing and grinding sounds often means there is media corruption or platter damage of some sort that the disk is trying to deal with. On IDE drives this condition is typically (not always) progressive if it’s gotten to the point the hard drive is thrashing. Do not run any more scans as continued use of the hard disk will often tend to exacerbate the problem.
Get a new drive and get the old info transfered ASAP. For a number of reasons when IDE drives start to stumble mechanically or electronically (even a tiny bit) it is typically the beginning of the end for them.
One thing jumped out at me from your post: “(It’s about 99.5% full.)” If this is true, I’m impressed it’s still functional at all. Hard drives should as a minimum have 10% free space; I prefer 25% or greater. Drive reliability under an operating system disappears when filled to capacity. You may have bad sectors (I doubt it), but you won’t know until you free up some space.
Do what Astro & Yeah say, back it all up, clear out some space, and then see what’s going on.
I heard the 10% thing held true for system drives, with the swap file and all, but I wasn’t sure about backup/non-system drives. It’s actually got 250MB free and it’s been that way for awhile now, as I continually toss files & games that I don’t need anymore. I can probably dump another 300MB but after that, it’s new-drive time. (Or 100 Zip discs…ha.)
Guess I’ll be waiting on my next paycheck…and no Napster for a week. Thanks for all the suggestions.
I had a similar problem using windat. This program has
a different name, but I think the problems may be related.
I think it has to do with the size of the file. I was
creating a song by splicing together sections in windat
(I was working with .wav files), and my hard drive started
doing scary things (which I would describe similar to what
you describe) as soon as the file got too big. I started
using windat because another program I was using for this
purpose had a similar problem, only at a smaller file size.
I finally found a shareware program to manipulate .wav files
that let me work with files of the size I wanted to. (Once
when using this program I must have done something too
complex, because it started the scary hard drive thing as
well. But for most purposes it seems to work.) I don’t
know if your hard drive was or can be damaged when the
strange noises start occuring. I hope not!
curiousgeorge: That sounds more like the swap file working overtime. It happens when you’re cutting & pasting HUGE files. I get that all the time with Wave Studio.
This sound’s more like a click-click…grinnndd…click-click…grinnndd…click. Happens at random intervals when I’m not even accessing the drive. Didn’t think much of it, until now…
Hard drives themselves should always be 100% functional whether 0% or 100% utilized. The drive does not care how many sectors are free (nor does the drive or controller even know how many are free). The operating system, OTOH, may get flaky when free space gets below a certain threshhold. JET posted that this was not his system drive, so utilization is not an issue. Even if a system drive is 100% full, it should never exhibit any “head thrashing” noises. “Chittering” noises may be a sign of badly fragmented data and can often be eliminated by a good defragging.
This sort of discussion is interesting from a techie point of view, but completely useless in the real world. Brand new 10GB hard drives are available for around $66 plus shipping. Attempts to salvage J.E.T.'s drive exceed that in value in about ten seconds.
Thanks for all the suggestions.