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Possible Hard Drive failure?

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8 replies

by pwc5003

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Hi I know many people may have asked this already but I'm wondering if my hard drive is about to fail. When I load up the C drive to view the files, it takes awhile for it to read everything. Same goes with the initial start up of programs. Even simple programs like Winamp take awhile to start up. Also when I was checking my hard drive info using Western Digital's DLT, there was a noise coming from my computer which I can only describe like cell phone vibrating on a table. I've also done disk cleanup and defrag already. Any thoughts? Thanks a lot.

8 replies

by mr.wiz

Have you ever checked for and removed spyware/malware from your computer? How about a virus scan? Was the DLT on CD? That will sometimes cause the vibration you describe. Check your system for spyware with adaware (http://www.adaware.com) and spybot (http://www.spybot.com). These should remove most to the spyware and should speed up your system. If not, let us know.

by fishohio330

How much memory does your computer have? Does it seem to run faster when first booted and slow down after a while or is it slow always?

by pwc5003

Yes I did the spyware scan using ad aware and i also use counter spy which seems to get what ad aware misses. I almost forgot about the ad ware scanning. It's been about two weeks since I did one. The result is still the same, lagging times to browse the HDD and still getting the vibrating noise when viewing HDD information even after taking out all my CDs from the disc drives. Also I definately can hear the vibrating coming from the middle of my tower where the HDD is.

by pwc5003

Just as I suspected. I'm gonna go get one right now. Been running this comp with it being like this for weeks. Thank you very much for the analysis.

by dougstevebailey

Fist thing first, Slowness in a pc can be cause by fragmentation on the hard drive.
Solution for this is to do a clean of the disk, disable the virtual memory (if you have one), Do a defrag of the hard drive. Then enable the virtual memory again

The launching of XP can be cause by Process running as residents ( the ones on the taskbar) . MSconfig will take you to the process that are loaded as residents (Startup Tab). Here you can disabled the ones that you would not like to be loaded at the loading of XP. Example of some of them on my pc are:
msnmsgr
Adobe Reader Speed Launcher
DrgtoDsc a roxio process

The sound you hear can come from the Cd-Rom when it runs CDs or can come from the Hdd. The first thing to do is to check the physical layer of troubleshooting (Check all is fine and properly screwed).

Open the case and turn it on, check where the sound comes from, if it comes from the hdd, I would really recommend you to back up all of the data, because this could be signs that your hdd is going South (bad).

You can also do a check disk (from the cmd type chkdsk ?, this will give you an idea of the options to pass to the command)or go to the following sit:
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/chkdsk.mspx?mfr=true The check disk tool will help to double check for bad sectors on the hard drive.

Hope this helps you out! Take care!

by deepsand

The "Discussion" forum is for matters of general discussion, not specific problems in search of a solution.

Post problems such as this to the "Question" forum, rather than the "Discussion" forum. There are those who specifically seek out problems in need of a solution, and that's where they go to look for such.

Additionally, the "Question" forum provides for your rating the helpfulness of responses, so that others with the same or similar problem might be able to more easily find a solution.

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