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Hard drive dying ?

Bulldog13

Golden Member
I believe my secondary hard drive is dying ?

After awhile of using my computer it starts making noises like it is powering up. Click, spin up, click spin up, wait 10 minutes, spin up.

Then a yellow exclamation sign appears on the windows xp taskbar...When I 2x click it, it just dissappears and the files on that drive are unavailable, even though that I can still see the drive when I 2x click on "My Computer".

So is this baby on it s last legs ? Anything I can do to salvage it ? I am annoyed because this is my data dump drive and most of my backed up stuff is on it.

 
I'd back up that data asap. Sounds like it's about had it. If it does die before you get the data backed up, try putting the hard drive in the freezer for about 20-30 minutes. It might give you just enough time to get the data backed up. I've never done this, but several people swear by it.
 
Have you tried running WD's diagnostic tools on the drive? You should be able to download them from WD's website if you didn't get the retail version of the drive (which includes the cd).

That would be my first step, followed quickly by backing up data.
 
back up data first then run the diagnostic tools...

diagnostic tools always put stress on the drives, so do that after fully backing up.
 
exactly what Paulson said.. never run diags on a failing drive until AFTER you've backed up the data.
 
yup its a good idea to get the data backed up first because the drive is most likely going to die really soon. If you did the diags first then you might go to start your data backup and get like half of the files recovered or most of them corrupted.

btw I'm in the same boat right now my Maxtor secondary drive which used to be my storage for my music archive and video files captured with TV tuner is going bad on me. I'm currently using Ontracks Easy Recovery to recovery my data in a slow process because the drive is messed up so badly. I tried many other tools and this is the only one that?s able to recover the data. I just hope the drive doesn?t completely crap out on me. Whatever is wrong it doesn?t seem to be mechanical right now though. As we speak my comp is still recovering data using that software at home while I'm here at my college and last I checked I had about 40 hours left to go until it?s estimated to be done by the software.
 
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