is my harddisk dying?

[Lemming]

hi all!

I have a little problem:
recently, my harddisk (an IBM Deskstar, IDE 7200) started spinning down spontaneously in the middle of operations. sometimes it comes back on after a couple of seconds, sometimes it tries but does not make it and sometimes it just stays dead. When this happens my Windows XP first waits a bit and if the disk does not come back up again it just crashes/reboots, usually giving me a disk error during bootup (disk isn't even found by the bios).
To be safe I backed up everything to a different disk already during one of its 'bright intervals'.

Now, I'm wondering if this is really the disk simply dying of old age (it has served me well for several years) or if it might be the controller or some other component on the mainboard - which has served me equally well and almost equally as long (it's my good old MSI K7T-Turbo with replaced capacitors )...
Might this be a temperature related problem? I haven't experienced anything like this in at least equally hot summers before, and the disk doesn't feel hot to touch. Usually the disk initially works fine after a cold boot when the PC was turned off for a while.

Is there anything I can do to try and pinpoint the problem? Would a controller error be able to produce a problem like this?
What are your thoughts on this?

Thanks for your help
Lemming

 

[corkyg]

Just make sure that in Power Management the drive is set to "Always On." If that is the case, then it sounds like a sick puppy. HDDs do have a life expectancy. Anything over 4-5 years is good.

 

[KGB]

Have you tried running the Drive Fitness Test?

 

[RebateMonger]

Have you double-checked your 4-pin molex power connector on the drive? I had one that I didn't think to check and the drive would spontaneously power-down. I figured the drive was failing until I wiggled the connector and realized it wasn't quite tight.

 

[Lemming]

thanks for your input everyone!

BIOS settings as well as power connectors shouldn't be a problem since I didn't change a thing in the last couple of months... but I'll doublecheck to make sure as soon as I get home tonight
and I'll also run the drive fitness test - thanks for the link kgbman!

I do think that it really is some sort of hardware problem, I just want to figure out what the faulty part is. A defective HD controller/mainboard would be a quite serious problem finance-wise, a new HD I could handle...

I'll keep you up to date!

 

[ZYFER]

I had this issue with a Western Digital drive after a power surge, apparently one of the power connectors after this event stopped supplying enough power for the drive, so when in heavy use it would switch off and then turn or attempt to turn back on. Hooking up another power connector cleared it up, good to make sure just in case.

 

[Lemming]

ok, this is what i got:
Bios settings are fine, I checked and switched the power connectors, IDE cable, still have the problem. also, I used to have a second disk running simultaneously on the same power line, and removing that from the system didn't improve the situation, so I guess the amount of available power is not the problem.

I ran the drive fitness test, specifically the exerciser test, and at some point during the 5 loops the disk must have quit, since the test finished with a 'bad sectors' error, and the program wasn't able to detect the disk any more. I guess even the dft wasn't designed to pick up this sort of problem...

Well, it looks like the disk is going to give up in the not so distant future, but I guess I can live with that

thanks again for the help!

Lemming