Am I facing impending hard drive failure or..

[Tominator]

....Motherboard IDE failure?

MSI 694D Pro with 2 700@933 P IIIs. Crucial memory. W2K. WD 100GB drive on the primary IDE.

When I reboot, the hard drive light stays on. The floppy light stays on. The DVD and CDRW lights alternately blink. I must turn power on and off and cross my fingers and MAYBE I can boot to Windows. Several attempts later everything works great. This only manifests itself upon a cold boot or restart. When I'm up and running everything works perfectly with ZERO problems.

If the hard drive light stays on, no boot!

Which is it? I have never had a hard drive failure on my own computer!

I'm backing up as we speak....

 

[Adul]

well testing the drives in another PC would be a good idea.

 

[Kartajan]

Missing 2 crucial items. What file system are you using? Which version of windows?

I have seen a Win2k system running FAT32 exhibit strange (what appeared to be imminent failure) symptoms, that were fixed by a format/ install under NTFS.

Hope this helps..

 

[Tominator]

As stated, W2k. FAT32. NTFS is not an option due to the need for compatibility.

This system was rock stable until 2 days ago, No changes in hardware..

NERO wants 147 disks to backup the disk.....So much for NERO as an option.

 

[Adul]

compatibility with what?

just backm up the important data

 

[GR8Madmax]

What about running WD tools to see if there is anything wrong with the drive(s)?

 

[Tominator]

Originally posted by: GR8Madmax
What about running WD tools to see if there is anything wrong with the drive(s)?

LOL! I laughing at myself! Now why didn't I think of that!😱

Adul

If I tried it in another comp the setup would be different. Only a dozen or so successful boots would tell me anything. By that time Windows would have reconfigured itself and possibly caused more problems. If this were a new installation there would be no problems with that. This has been up and running perfectly for a long time with various tweaks and settings.

Thanks though as I just needed someone to refresh my memory on some options here. 🙂

 

[Kartajan]

option:

Partition HDD. NTFS for OS, FAT32 for "shared" storage with whatever you need compatibility. (Assuming dual- boot w/ previous ver of win or linux)

backup: Copy all your regular data that you need to keep to 2 folder, burn that.
as long as you retained the installation disks for your applications/ OS you shouldn't need to backup the entire drive.
not to mention the fact that backing up a (potentially problematic) setup would retain the faults.

** you stated that the system was stable until 2 days ago. How long were you stable? How much free space do you have left on the drive? how are your temps? What voltages have you been running? Does the fault remain if you "un- overclock"?