Is my hard drive dying?

[marko1]

for the past couple of weeks my computer has been freezing/crashing. After a hard reset sometimes it will not boot into windows. It will get as far as the windows loading screen and then just hang. Sometimes it wont even make it to the XP loading screen. This problem usually happens when the drive needs to be accessed during a game ( this is when it mostly happens ), but last night I tried to defrag and it locked up! But then again sometimes I have no problems. Temps are all fine. Any help/suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks


3700+
dfi LP UT4
WD 160 Gbyte sata
1 gig ocz platinum
7800 gt
pcp&c 510

 

[marko1]

Nobody?

 

[chusteczka]

This situation could be a hardware or a driver issue. It may also be a power supply issue. Is your system overclocked? Have you recently reconfigured the system or added new hardware?

Try testing the memory with memtest through at least one cycle of tests. Most people recommend running memtest for 12 hours or so when testing an overclocked system's stability but I have found that if my system gets through the first cycle of tests without errors that it will not experience any errors no matter how long I leave it to run. Maybe I am incorrect in this but this is what I have found.

memtest86
memtest86+

Try testing the hard drive with a diagnostic utility. It appears you have a Western Digital hard drive so download their diagnostic utility and test your drive with it. Let that tell you if your hard drive is failing.

Western Digital Data Lifeguard Tools 11.2 for Windows

 

[Atheus]

It is most likely a hard disk problem, although your mobo is very picky about a lot of things... could be some BIOS setting, overclocking or memory tweaks...