is my hard drive is dead?

[dolph]

last night i came home to find my computer in the middle of starting up, but stalling right after it gave all the information about what was connected, and it said it needed a system disk. i restarted, it didn't list my hard drives initially and took a long time to get past the first screen, and when it finally got to the win98 splash screen it hung there for a few minutes, then wanted to go into safe mode except by mistake i prompted it into normal in my anxiousness to get it working. on the safe mode prompt it said something about the registry, an error i don't recall seeing on other safe mode screens.

anyway, it never loaded windows (after 10 minutes) so i turned it off and went to bed. this morning i tried turning it on and the bios didn't find the hard drive at all. plus, there's been this weird clicking noise that definitely wasn't there before. is my hard drive dead?

 

[panhead49]

sounds like the old hard drive dieing clicking to me.........seriously........i do think its dead..........try the basics first.....safemode....scandisk.....then maybe restore registery.......if that doesent work.....your lookin at a fdisk ...format......that will tell you if its still alive....

 

[MustangSVT]

get a windows 98 startup disk.

start the computer with the disk.
if it loads up but says something about not finding the valid fat info, that means the hard drive is not being detected at all.

reboot into bios, disable primary master (or primary ide channel) save and exit, go back to bios, set it to auto, save and exit.

if it does boot. it should create a ramdrive as D: and you should be at A prompt.

type this.

scandisk c: /surface/all

look at what problems come up.

if it does not complete within 2~3 hours (normally 1 hour on a good workign computer(but i guess it depends on the hdd size and amount of files u have in it)), its time to do format.

Fdisk

remove all the partitions.
create primary dos partition.

exit.

start format C: /u
at the end after u enter your volume lable it'll show u MB of bad sectors.
if there is, do format again, if that number increases its a bad hard drive.

 

[veryape]

If you do somehow manage to get it to boot into Windows i'd back it up immediately, before it dies again. At least then you might save yourself some downloading down the line. I hate it when that happens.:frown: