My Hard Drive is dying --> clicking sounds

[WayneTeK]

Ok, i'm sort of paranoid to see if i lost data or not cause my hard drive is dying. It makes crazy ass clicking sounds and lately, whenever i boot up the computer, it goes into the BLUE SCREEN and is running chkdsk to recover sectors of damaged data.

my question though is: could i have lost data and the computer wont' report it to me even though it run chkdsk?

 

[cjbee]

You should hurry and back up all of the data that's still recoverable while you still can...the future of that hard drive is not "sounding" too pretty at this stage.

Good luck!

 

[bocamojo]

To answer your question, if you have sectors that are bad, the software will try and mark them as unusable. You don't know whether you had data on those sectors or not, so it is not a given that you have actually lost any data, but if it's blue screening, there's a pretty good chance that at least one of the sectors contained critical windows data, which may prevent the machine from being able to successfully boot up. I would not boot up that hard drive anymore, if possible. Instead, get a new hard drive, install the OS on it, and then add this drive back into your system as a secondary drive (make sure to set your master/slave jumpers correctly, depending upon which IDE connector you use and how you are connecting your drives). After that, use a backup program to copy your data, or move it over to your new drive.

 

[WayneTeK]

Originally posted by: bocamojo
To answer your question, if you have sectors that are bad, the software will try and mark them as unusable. You don't know whether you had data on those sectors or not, so it is not a given that you have actually lost any data, but if it's blue screening, there's a pretty good chance that at least one of the sectors contained critical windows data, which may prevent the machine from being able to successfully boot up. I would not boot up that hard drive anymore, if possible. Instead, get a new hard drive, install the OS on it, and then add this drive back into your system as a secondary drive (make sure to set your master/slave jumpers correctly, depending upon which IDE connector you use and how you are connecting your drives). After that, use a backup program to copy your data, or move it over to your new drive.

thanks for the tip!

Yeah, i already bought a new HD and i plan to use my dying drive as a "SLAVE" for right now and then transfer over the files via "DRAG AND DROP" hehe.