Mysterious HDD Failure

[xSnowblindx]

I had left my computer for a while, and just today I hooked it up and ran it. It worked fine the first time, and it ran updates for AVG and Norton. The updates required a restart and I did, but this time when I booted up it got to the windows loading screen it stayed on that screen for a while and the hard drive made a sound over and over again.. then it came up with a bluescreen with the error info:

Stop: 0x00000024 (0x001902FE, 0xF7ACAB6C, 0xF7ACA868, 0xF747E746)

Ntfs.sys - address F747E746 base at F746D000, DateStamp 41107eea

After spending hours on the phone with Costa Rican *rolls eyes* tech support, they had me run Seagate SeaTools and scan the hard drive for errors. After 2 hours of running it, only 30 sectors had been scanned- all were "bad sectors"...

Anyways, the computer was still under warranty so they're sending a replacement, but my question is- what could cause such a serious hard drive failure? I had done some pretty noob overclocking on that computer and I may have accidentally set something wrong in the BIOS... but I don't know... any ideas? Thanks.

 

[Atheus]

So did you try reformatting? did it make that sound agsin? was it a kind of grinding sound? In any case I doubt your bios settings had anything to do with it.

 

[FlyingPenguin]

Did tech support have you disconnect and reconnect the IDE ribbon? It could be a dirty connection on the IDE ribbon or even a bad ribbon cable. (although if the drive made a clicking or clunking noise when it failed it's almost certainly a physical disk error).

A hard drive can fail anytime. Other things than can cause this: bumping the computer while it's running, power surge, bad PSU (I've seen PSUs with bad caps spike and damage hard drives on power up).