harddrive dead?

[stringcheeseincident]

we have this old gateway (p3 550mhz, 256mb ram, 10gb hdd) that my brother uses in our basement. lately its been acting funny, he said it was making funny noises about a week ago. i assumed the harddrive was starting to go, considering its around 7 or 8 years old. a few days later, when he turned it on, he kept getting an "operating system not found" message, the pc wouldn't boot into windows. figured it was still the harddrive, i couldn't think of anything else it would be. we got it to boot yesterday, he burned a cd of all his important files, and now it won't boot anymore...plus there are a lot more noises. would everyone agree that this is a harddrive problem? anything else it could be?

 

[SVT Cobra]

yeah I would say a HD problem...it powers up alright and everything?

 

[The Pentium Guy]

[This was 3 years ago] I had the same problem on my HP machine. Except it was a year old and didn't make any noises.

Turned out that when the machine crashed in the MIDDLE OF A FRAG IN UNREAL TOURNAMENT! It was a POS HP that my dad gave me. It cost about $150, and preowned and came with spyware, and I hated it to death!) I kicked the case....yeah. I kicked the case >_<. And the harddrive cable came loose <-- I didn't know this at the time.

I got so freaked out when the machine shut itself off and said OS not found. I didn't have the internet to help me find out wtf the problem was (no computer, duh). I opened up my case (I thought this was IMPOSIBLE at the time). I saw a HUGE jumble of wires and I didn't understand ANYTHING. But I saw a cable connected to the mobo (I didn't know what this was at the time obviously), but NOT the harddrive. So I'm like WTF WTF DO I DO? WTF WTF IM SO CONFUSED. So I connected the cable. And the thing booted! That was my first lesson into computers!

-The Pentium Guy

 

[Leros]

Try booting from a bootable linux distro. If that works, its certainly the harddrive.

 

[Jojo7]

First of all, you need to get into the bios and see if the hard drive is actually being detected. If it is, run the appropriate hard drive diagnostic depending on the manufacturer.