Hard Drive Failing?

[leapingfrog0]

My uncle's computer is starting to have weird problems. The other day while he was checking his email in Outlook Express, he got a BSOD about windows not being able to access volume "C" or something like that ... "Data or files may be lost." I ran a scan disk and it fixed that problem.

Defragging takes FOREVER on his computer, and if the screensaver goes on while he defrags it will restart to the beginning instead of skipping foward to where it last was... he said it will often not complete defragging.

And today he booted up the computer and heard a weird noise coming from his case that lasted a second.. it sounds like a hard drive grinding (kinda like a fan vibrating hard against the case), and then it goes away. When it was about to boot into Windows it says "BOOT DISK FAILURE. INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER."

I did another cold boot and didn't hear the noise this time and it went into Windows fine. I tried another cold boot.. it made that noise, didn't detect the hard drive in the BIOS, and gave the error message.. so the system detects the HD off and on and it only detects it if it does not make that weird grinding noise.

His hard drive is made by Quantum (yes, very sucky) so I ran the Quantum Diagnostics on the drive and it passed all the tests.. I wrote zero's to the drive and everything and it's still doing the same things.

I've told him he needs a new HD, but before I go out and buy one for him I want to make sure that that's what the problem is. What do you think?

Thanks,
Andrew

 

[IcemanJer]

with something as inconsistent as that... my guess would be it's the on-set of a harddrive failure.

 

[leapingfrog0]

Thanks...

Any other ideas?

 

[RemyCanad]

I would put all my money on a dieing HD. My brother has a compaq that did the same thing. When he would turn it on, you would hear some grinding and then get a Boot disk failure. All he did was flip the surge over and over until the HD clicked back on. Finally the HD died and we sent it back to compaq. They replaced the HD and everything has been jus fine from there.