Am I F'd?!?
 

My desktop computer started making rapid dinging noises. I'm guessing it's from the HDD. Now when it boots up, the CMOS (?) doesn't recognise the HDD as a boot device.

It is/was a Maxtor 60GB 2M (?) cache that's about 3 years old. My sys is a P-3 933MGHz, 1 GB SDRAM, Asus MB...usuall on 24/7, have Nortons AV and Personal Firewall, on UPS power supply, defrag every 1-2 weeks...that's all I can think of right now that maybe of importance.

Been a looong trying summer. Go figure, I was going to back everything up the day after until that happened. Not my summer for things running smoothly.

Anyhoo, how long does a typical HDD last? I plan on buying a new system. Should I get 2 HDDs and if I do...what do, what HDDs you recommend? How should I have the settings or do to maximize its lifespan?

Much thanks in advance.

Actual dinging like a bell goes "ding" or clicking noises? Is it a regular "ding" like ding-ding-ding-ding or random like dingding---ding-ding-dingitydingding-----ding?

Can you boot from a boot disk and access the HDD in question?

3 years is right at the end of average HDD life for me. I kill one in about 2-3 years. It sounds like the platters are not spinning for some reason. Check the connection though it could be loose. Try to access your drive by booting from something else and back up your data if you can. Methinks a new HDD is in your future.

The tick of death, as we call it at work, is the sound of the bearings slowly siezing up. It sounds like that's what your drive may be doing - the seek-head impacting against the side of the drive case.

Chances are, you won't be able to recover any data off it if the drive is so far gone that the system won't boot. What you can try is to take your current harddrive, take it out of your system, and keep it somewhere safe.

Buy a new harddrive, build the system, and then put the old harddrive in as a secondary drive. If you're very lucky, you might be able to swipe a few files off it.

Try to find a friend or something that lives closeby and doesn't mind you tinkering with his/her PC.
You could put your drive in the other machine, see if it can read data (and then quickly back it up!) for you.

Make sure they have some way of quickly dumping the amount of data you want saved... If you can read it once in a 100 tries, and it succeeds, you'll be pissed at yourself if you did not prepare room for your data!

my $0.02 If its not a loose connection then your in for a new drive. If you want: get two. You could cross-backup your important files. If you don't need the extra space use a RAID (mirror) configuration. That way if one HDD unit breaks the other conatins a copy of all data.

it's the hard drive.

my old one use to make that noise and sometimes didnt get recognized.

Ah this kinda just happened to me. My super old hard drive (think 7+ years and 8 gigs) started ticking like crazy at any time anything happened on the comp. PC magazine said that freezing the drive in a bag and then putting it back in still frozen may buy you some time to pull some files off. thankfully I had just backed up my data before my drive died :D

i've been digging the recent western digital drives, I've had less failure rates with those than others YMMV,

WD's generally have a 300,000 MTBF so that'd be 34 years

i had a drive fail today too. it was a member of a raid 1 array. i lost a bunch of important stuff before forking over the $$ to setup 2 arrays. definitely worth it.

if the drive just quit reading all at once you're probably up shit creek. if it will randomly read....eg. (putting the drive in another computer and being able to access info) here's a little trick. what usually happens when a drive is dying (click of death) is when it gets too hot, it quits reading. well lets keep that drive cool!!! get a couple really heavy duty plastic bags(like a heavy zip lock.) u might need some longer IDE cables and power cables to do this. (BTW this is the cheap way to do this without using refridgerated coolant systems)
Get a bucket and fill it with ice, yes i did say ice. hook the hard drive up to the cables and bag it in the zip locks. make sure the bags are good!!! NO HOLES. hanging the drive out of the comp., stuff it in the bags and put it in the ice. keep it cool and backup like a madman. trust me it works. i've used it on multiple occasions to save data on a dying drive. that is DYING drive. not DEAD. this does no good if the drive has failed completely.
well theres my 2 bits

yeah...from what you guys described, it's the click of death. My comp is on the 3rd floor...no we got no A/C...it's been quite hot this summer...as mentioned before it was on 24/7 and come to think of it, there was just the fan(s) that was originally in the system. I sould get extra fans put in hunh?

OK...from all your recommendations, I'll get 2 HDDs and extra fans put in.

I'm leary of water cooled sytems. I read a thread here awhile back and personally not convinced because of my "type" of computer use. Just surf, work on spreadsheets and play the odd game online. I'm guessing that plain ol fans should suffice.

Thanks again all...you've been a ton of help.

I'll add another note. After the dinging stops, you'll get a hum. Now something's stuck. When all else fails, just whack the drive (or the cpu near the drive). I know it sounds weird, but a good smack can unstick a drive lone enough for you to back up.

NOTE: you may want to remove any working HDD if you plan on whacking away. At least take it out the case and leave it plugged in so you don't knock it out of whack trying to fix the other one.

I brought the HDD to my comp friend and somehow it started working again. Got a new HDD and tranferring files as I type. Oh what fun...serves me right not to back up frequently.

Again...much thanks...I raise my beer bottle to you all

Maxtor drives carry a three year warranty. If you are within the warranty, just go to the Maxtor website to get an RMA (returned material authorization) code and send it back. They will replace it for you (but will not save your data for you, costs too much) and you will have another in about 3 weeks, give or take. I speak from personal experience having dealt with this exact issue last year.

Thanks Soin...I'll call them up and look into it.

A similar thing has been happening to my older computer. It is almost 3 years old is left on most of the time. Infact, once while turning on the computer, it said something that seemed to mean the HDD wasn't working or something. A little while later, it worked again. I guess it is on the verge of dying. I'll need to replace it.