Old HD dies after awhile...

[HermDogg]

I have a maxtor 80 gig that I use as a secondary drive to store games and such on. The problem is, after about 1-2 hours of having the computer on, all of a sudden it will stop working. If I try to view the files on it, explorer hangs and I get a yellow triangle with an exclamation point in the system tray. Right-clicking, left-clicking and holding the mouse over it (to see what it says) does nothing. I plan on getting a new, bigger drive soon, but I don't get paid for another week and was wondering if it was safe to keep running until then. I plan on just ghosting over all the files onto the new drive, so should I disconnect it until then or is it safe to keep running? Alternatively, is there anyway this is a correctable error? Any help appreciated!

 

[Fencer128]

Well, you're certainly doing the right thing by getting a new drive. If you really want to try to repair the drive, or if you really need data off of it and it's misbehaving the best advice I can give you is spend $89.99 on SpinRite 6.

Have a read about it on the official site above/reviews. It appears to be very good and has worked for a frined of mine using version 5 on a FAT32 drive.

If you just need the data - and can keep the drive working whilst you do it - I'm sure there are some freeware utilities available to help you (although I'm guessing SpinRite does it better).

Good luck,

Andy

 

[fisheye]

Check the system log to see if there's an error generated, it could help you find the culprit here - or at least see what kind of error occured. (Control Panel, click on Administrative Tools, then Event Viewer. Click on System). I've had problems with hard drives recently and found out that the yellow-triangle-with-exclaimation-point probably means something's been written to the log.

 

[HermDogg]

Thanks to both of you! I've heard about checking Events Manager but could never figure out where it was (and was too lazy to do a search for it). It had about 50-100 instances of the same error, with Microsoft's reccomendation to replace the drive. Oh well.. Thanks again!

 

[Fern]

Have you run maxtor's Powermax yet? It's their HD diag utility.
EDIT: It can be d/l from their site.