I think my HD is going bad

[Budeez]

My computer is constantly freezing up. Been doing so for the last 2 weeks. Always I hear the HD start to to spin. Whirrrrl....Whirrrrrl...Whirrrrl. In other words I hear it spin, stop, spin. It does this alot. I can't remember this happening on any other computers I've owned. This machine seems plenty fast for ordinary tasks. AMD phenom 9500. 3 gigs ram. vista 32 bit. It doesn't seem to matter what I'm running, maybe just a web browser. Also yesterday and today I had glitches in thunderbird, I had to manually recover my emails twice.

Is there a utility to test to see if my HD is going?

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Originally posted by: Budeez
My computer is constantly freezing up. Been doing so for the last 2 weeks. Always I hear the HD start to to spin. Whirrrrl....Whirrrrrl...Whirrrrl. In other words I hear it spin, stop, spin. It does this alot. I can't remember this happening on any other computers I've owned. This machine seems plenty fast for ordinary tasks. AMD phenom 9500. 3 gigs ram. vista 32 bit. It doesn't seem to matter what I'm running, maybe just a web browser. Also yesterday and today I had glitches in thunderbird, I had to manually recover my emails twice.

Is there a utility to test to see if my HD is going?

Most all of the drive makers -- WD, Hitachi, Seagate -- have their own diagnostic utility for 3.5"-floppy installation and floppy-boot-up. They even have repair-features, but the common opinion is this: once the disk starts going south and needing that kind of low-level repair, it will continue to go south -- if it hasn't already died.

I had a Seagate 7200.10 drive that showed the same noisy symptoms, and it died a day later. Completely.

 

[nickbits]

Double check that the "Turn off hard disks" setting isn't set to something stupid like 1 minute. It is in Power Options in Control Panel.

 

[BlueAcolyte]

You can also try HD Tune.

 

[Budeez]

HD Tune says my HD is fine. Thanks for the tip. I ran a random read memory test but have no clue what the numbers mean. 77 IOPS 12 MS 0.038 MB/sec for 512 bytes transfer size......up to 30 IOPS 32 MS 30.4 MB/sec for 2 1MB transfer size. As for "Turn off hard disks" it was set to never turn off.

 

[killster1]

An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk3\D during a paging operation.

not to hijack your thread but i also have hard disk questions.. ive got this error with two diff 640gb drives.. i mean the hard drive that did it before is not even powered on i switched to this 640gb black wd to see if it solved the problem but it shows those errors in event viewer 12 days between but like 30 errors each time.. (in middle of night so no one was even using it..)

so im starting to think its a bad motherboard controller so tempted to buy a raid card or use a sata pci card i have laying around..