Odd hard drive problems.

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Ok, so last night I was happily spamming along and listening to music on my laptop when something odd happened. The music stopped, and everything came to a screeching halt. I heard a ticking sound and figured my fan was clogged up with dust, so I had to do a hard shutdown (at this point nothing was working). I used my caned air to blow out my heatsink and fan, but only a little dust came out. So I plugged everything back in and started her back up. The ticking sound came right back. So I put my ear up to it and found that the sound was coming from the opposite side of the laptop...where the hard drive is.

Not knowing what was going on, I kept on talking at #sorcerers. Then it happened. A louder, grinding sound started coming form it and things slowed way down again...but not to a complete stop. I figured my HDD was damaged and franticly plugged in my Mp3 player, and tried to backup everything file I needed, using its "removable disk" feature. I was about half way though copying all the files I needed when the 'blue screen of death' popped up, and I was forced to do another hard shut down.

After that, I tired several times to boot up, but I kept getting an error that a disk boot failure occurred. So I disconnected all sources of power and pulled out the HDD, and *man* was it hot! I know HDDs tend to run quite warm, but this sucker was HOT!

At this point I figured the HDD was toast...literally. So I re-installed it in to my laptop and went to bed. But then the strangest thing happened after I got home from work today. I tried one last time to try to get it to boot up...and it did! Just fine too, I might add. Needless to say, I finished backing up everything I could think of as fast as I could.

Suspecting malware might have been the culprit, I did a full scan with McAfee, SpySweeper, and Ad-Aware. Nothing, save for a few "questionable" programs I've had for the past year or so *cough* cracks *cough*.

So what do you think could have caused this near fatal melt-down?

BTW, I'm currently shopping around for a new HDD...just in case.

 

the same thing happend to me, just on my desktop, it works fine now and hos done for long, but man was i scared!
anyway, now i got an external HDD with everything important and unnecessary on, a VErY good thing

 

Sounds like a bearing is gone (that rattling sound) and your harddrive is gasping its last breath (listening for the whining).

 

Ok, so as an update, I decided to play BG2 last night and I ran in to the same problem. But it was only *after* my laptop had been running for over 2 hours, and it happened about 30 minutes after starting the game.

So is it a drive overheating issue? Could it be a fluid berring that acts differently at higher temps? Or, is it just possesed?

 

It could be something'd gone defunct, but only shows up if the drive overheats.

Anyway make sure to always have everything backed up on an external drive at all times. If you can help it try not to have the computer on for more than two hours at a time. If you need it for longer times, just turn it off after a while and leave it for 10 minutes to cool down. And when the drive finally dies (which it will) throw it away and get a replacement

 

If after the computer has been turned off for a while, and restarts with no problems performing the same tasks, then it's more than likely a heat issue.