Horrible Hard Drive shinanigans

[Plague]

So there I am, idely browsing my files one quiet night when suddenly the Hard-drive starts making these horrible clicking sounds, like one of the writer arms are stuck or going crazy. Everything locks up and then it crashes the entire system with a win32.sys error.

I ponder for a moment and go to reboot, the noice kicks back in. Click-Thunk, over and over again, so I shut it off and give it a minute while I run around panicing (well not really). After a few more boot attepts, the clicking makes a last thunk.. and starts working properly, the computer boots with no problem. Taking this as a sign of impending doom, I back up my files to cd's when, on the third one, a certain image file I've had for awhile completly locks up the system while Nero is buring it. A jpg image. So I reboot and try to bring the image up in IE and.. once again the whole system locks up, because of this one image. In fact, after multiple testing, anything I do to that image, load, virus scan, rename, etc locks the system... except deleting it. Which I did. I figure a spot on the Hd must be to blame and run checkdisk and it picks up a bad cluster on the pagefile and then locks up on test 5. I reboot to no problem but I'm left wondering what the hell is going on? Any ideas or suggestions anyone?

To put this story into perspective..
I am running a AMD thunderbird 1ghz
256 megs of ram (I've had 2 sticks on me die between this month and the last)
Win2k Pro (all the updates)
a WD harddrive (as for what model or type, I don't know)
and a Shuttle motherboard with an AMD 750 chip I believe.

Any suggestions would be helpful.

 

[Masque]

Just my $.02 but given the types of noises you heard (I could almost hear them myself because of your descriptions ) I would start thinking about some hard drive shopping. Those sound like drive platters clanking on you and your drive will, most likely, fail on you sometime soon.....usually at the most inconvenient time.

 

[Nodsu]

Just continue backing up your data. And pray that the disk stays together until you get everything you need. There is no point backing up everything, start with the most critical stuff and work your way down.

 

[Plague]

Suprisingly, it's lasted this long, only 4 incidents of this occuring since it first happened. Each time, a good run of WD's repair utility repaired any damage and life went on.

However, weary of this, I'm picking up a new maxtor DiamondMax plus 9 80gb to replace it and I have a question. What would be the easiest way to transfer everything from one HD to the other? Install the new as a slave, then mass copy and revert it to a master afterwards?
Pick up a drive imager and let that handle it?
Or is the long term method of reinstall and backup restore from cd the way to go?

 

[Nodsu]

Some sort of a drive image thing is the most convenient way if you intend to transfer the OS also. If you just want to copy data files then you can do that from Windows.

 

[Rick]

Yes, your drive is bad. Often times, when drives do these kinds of things, they will start up fine if you let them sit for awhile and work okay for a few minutes or a few hours.

You better quit using that drive and replace it immediately if your data is important to you.

I wouldn't trust a drive like that for imaging, because they usually don't operating long enough to finish the image. I would copy your important data FIRST. Then you can try imaging it. You have no idea when it is going to die, but typically doom isn't far away when you get symptoms like this.

 

[Liquidlen]

I agree with Rick Your pretty lucky to have gotten this far.Iwould opt for a clean install.After you have rebilt go and get Drive image or Ghost or whatever and image your clean install so you don't find yourself here again. Backed up data is easy to replace.

 

[Plague]

Well, it actualy managed to survive through a complete harddrive copy. I ended up using MaxBlast3, which did a perfect job (save for the fact I had to run a quick chkdsk before it would boot) but it took a good 4 hours. I tried R-Drive Image earlier, but it failed 4 times in a row without any explanation at all, always at 99%.