HDD Dieing
 

I got a new system around a month ago now (specs at the bottem of the page), and everything was working perfectly up until I booted her up today after classes. I came home, started the system up and waited for windows to load...I waited and waited and waited and finally after around 10 mins (Seriously) I finally was able to log into my account. Now the hard drive is a 80gb Maxtor SATA drive and has been partitioned into 3 logical drives, my Sys one, Programs, and Storage. I was thinking head crash but it still works, just VERY slow. I took off the Swap file (I have a gb of ram so things still run ok) but even opening notepad takes around 30 seconds. So after this I was thinking, ahh well probably just a virus or some retarded thing so I went into Windows Setup to see if I could just reinstall windows and then install a virus scanner. No luck. It gets to the point of "Finding previous versions of windows" and hard locks.
My question is do any of you know of a reason that my hdd would just die like this? And if so any suggestions on how I can go about getting my data back (all 50-70gb)


Athlon 2100+ @ 2.4GHZ
Abit NF7-S /w sound storm
1gb Kingston HyperX
Radeon 9800 PRO
80gb Maxtor SATA
ATAPI CD-RW

Are you hearing "evil noises" such as the tick of death (ie: a pinging noise coming from your harddrive), or anything like that?

It sounds more like your OS got hosed by a virus or something else and/or your harddrive was very fragmented and/or you've got some program residing in memory that's just devouring every bit of CPU power you have. Of course, all this is assuming that you weren't hearing noises.

If the harddrive is dying, your best bet for recovering the data is to pop it into a friend's computer (a friend with a massive amount of free space) as a secondary drive and copy the data to his computer.

try defraging the hard drive, that will speed it up, but not 10 min worth, try scan disk full scan.

the next step is data recovery, get in touch with the manufacturer, it should be under warrenty still ask them to send you a new hard drive and then copy the system to the other.

Thats no problem the system I am on now has over 500gb of HDD space. (I have 2 systems)

Also its not JUST my OS, during the XP Install process it hardlocks so it wouldn't be a CPU issue (I checked that to begin with and my CPU / RAM were both at under 1% Used) It MAY be fragmentation but that wouldn't be explainable condisering I was using my system FINE last night. I mean I never noticed any slowdown at all until today. Do you know of a virus that attaches itself to your HDD like that? and even slows it down in dos?

I know this may seem a bit odd, but in the past i've had my hdd's die on me faster when I partition them. I've recently setup a raid-0 w/ 2 80's, and a seperate 40. It's only been roughly 8 months, and i've noticed them slowing down considerably. My suggestion to you, would be backup, format, and don't partition.

you got rid of your swap file ??? nono put it back, what did you do zero the size ?

boot the windows console version and poke around see if its ok

are you sure its locked and not running chkdsk with no output, it does that sometimes, your hd light will be on all the time and you should be able to hear it seeking, also i've noticed that if its stuck ina chkdsk during boot and you do an install, itll keep doing it everytime you reboot, until a fullly successful reboot and run is done.

Well after a while of trying to get things working, I finally got things to work without totally destroying the data. It seems that it was a virus, but no virus scanner seen it. The drive was not fragmented or nothing I had to wipe the System Partition, but I was able to install a second hard drive in the system, install XP on it, make it the Boot drive, and then Xfer the files over. A weird way around things but it works and thats all that matters. Anyway just to let you know Charlie, I disabled the Swap File AFTER this happened to see if it was the Hard Drive that was causing the problem or the Swap File. Also it booted fine, believe me this was such a weird thing, I dont even know how to explain everything LOL, but like I said before its over now and all is good, thanks for all the replies guys.

heh glad its working, if you do decide to disable your swap file though your system will run like crap most likely, even with a lot of ram

Good work Vanquish! And now a word on swap (the never ending story):

My experience is that systems with half a gig ram or more runs quite fine without the swapfile. But there is a good reason to have one anyway.

When programs start they ask to allocate memory they MAY use. Windows gives them addresses in the swapfile range first and later if they really needs it they get real ram. This way the real ram is as free as posible. If you have little or no swapfile windows has to reserve real ram that may never be used, and then it gets locked up for nothing.

Note that even if windows gives away addresses in the swapfile it does not create it physically. Therefore a good way is to start with a small size swap but have a lagre max size just for windows to use as virtual address space.

It is because of this that if you have it set to 200MB-800MB taskmanager may report use of 350MB though the file on disk still is just 200MB. It reports the address allocation. In this example you have saved yourself 150MB real RAM. A good thing.

I guarantee you some software particulary games, audio editors, image editors etc won't work at all if you disable your swap file, let windows xp manage it. it does a lot better job than previous versions, also it'll make your system faster since accessing the pagefile is faster than reloading the dll or whatever from disk. on top of that you'll be limiting your maxium memory available to your physical ram size, which means less cache

LOL Yeah I know, I wasn't going to leave it off, I was just trouble shooting ;) I do DV as a job now so I know how to tweak windows to get performance for stuff. Thanks anyway tho