Hard drive failure?

[AND_YOU_ARE]

I am thinking that my hard drive might fail soon. Its a 80gb maxtor, ata133. It takes longer to boot up windows and load the programs than before. Twice the time it took before. It makes a sound like an alternater is trying to turn over when its booting up windows. Once in windows it sounds fine and dows not run slow. Does all this mean it is going to fail?

I run the computer 24/7 seven months of the year when at college. I often run programs like video compression, audio and video conversion over night. The drives get a fiar amount of use. Should they last longer than this?

Should I be conserned that it might crash soon?

 

[EricB]

use this to test it. powermax 4.0

 

[AND_YOU_ARE]

What will this tell me? Does it tell the condition of the drive or performace or what?

 

[EricB]

It has different kind of stress tests plus other things like formatting (high level or low level). I never use it to test a drive, but I am about 2 now. we had a winter storm here in columbus ohio, where the freezing rain and snow was make tranformers explod left and right. I got a electric surge on this computer and the hard drive hasn't acted right since

 

[AND_YOU_ARE]

Ah. After bringing my computer home from college it has been having those problems ever since. I am thinking that all the use that I have it might be time to bite the dust.

 

[AND_YOU_ARE]

Nobody else has any ideas that could help?

 

[barhoc11]

I would just make backups of everything you need that is crucial, just in case. Are you sure its the hard drive making that loud noise when you start up? I had the same problem turned out it was a bad fan.

 

[AND_YOU_ARE]

Yeah its the hard drive, because it goes away after windows is loaded. Only during booting up do you hear the noise. Never before has it happened, and I have tried it with out the fans on when booting up.

 

[EricB]

What will this tell me? Does it tell the condition of the drive or performace or what?

I test it on mine. it had an error. I did a low level (full) format. I then partitioned it and all is fine now. I would back your data files up and try to reformat to see if it goes away. if not you need a new hard drive probably

 

[ardy89]

that link dont work, please could u redo it!!! i would like to test my hard drives!!