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possible hard drive trouble

C

cavingjan

Golden Member
I'm having some "issues" with my workstation at home. Every once in a while, I'll hear the hard drive give a light click followed by a second click a few seconds later. It brings to mind an image of the head arm moving to one side and then going back to the other. Then the system hard locks with the HDD led light on. I usually have to kill the power and then reboot. It will usually do this in IE but it eventually starts to do this at the desktop and then other programs. Progressively getting worse and requiring less time before another lock up. Sometimes after rebooting, I get a checksum error for the BIOS and the defaults are loaded. If I boot into DOS and run wddiag, it runs through the drive and reports no problems but the problem completely goes away until the system is shut down for a couple days. The hard drive is a 6.4 Gig Western Digital IDE drive. I have nothing else on that channel but I have a CDRW and a zip drive on the secondary channel. Its a K6-2 450 on a TMC TI5VG+ board.
I've got a couple of possibilities and I'm looking for suggestions. I'm thinking its probably a drive that is slowly going to die. But I have not ruled out a dead CMOS battery or possibly even a IDE controller going bad. Anybody have this happen to them?
 
Well it does sound lilke a hard drive that is slowly dieing. First step is to run scandisk through DOS. I prefer DOS because you have no interruptions and it has a better user interface than windows does. In my opinion at least. If it reports a lot of bad sectors then yes, your drive is slowly dieing. If not then it is possibly something like bad drive circuitry, or controller on the motherboard. Anyway, before anything run scandisk. Another thing to consider is that WD's like to do a drive cache here and there, and it is usually 2-3 clicks of the HD. I dunno if that'll help anything, but good luck to ya.

Marc
 
I've run scan disk from windows. I didn't use the DOS version lately other than quick scans while rebooting. I'll try that tonight but so far it hasn't shown any bad sectors. Two years ago I did have a problem with this drive. It decided to have bad sectors right where the windows\system directory lived.
I didn't know about the cache. I'll look in that direction. Thanks.
 
Go to WD site and find their drive check software. It will sometimes pick up problems others wont. If its possible its under warranty you need it anyway for the claim. Runs a scan and gives you a report to print out.
 
wddiag is an older version of those utilities. I had problems with the new version. It said it couldn't find any SMART drives. I guess thats another possible clue isn't it? I have an email in to them now. Hopefully I'll hear something back soon. Thanks for all the suggestions.
 
I had the exact same problem. Same hard drive, same everything. Had to have the drive RMA'd. Hate to say this, but it's going south. See if you can get it RMA'd through a local dealer, perhaps where you bought it, or if not, then call them directly. Hope this helps.
 
cavingjan - first thing is to save all your user-created files on some other media. Then do all those other things 😛

guluk
 
I already keep at least two copies of everything on multiply computers. Western Digital is suspecting a bad CMOS battery. Now if only the computer shops around here sold them.
 
Is your Power Management kicking in during these times? I'd try disabling that in Control Panel/Power Management and see what happens.
 
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