Bad HD causes entire system to crash?

[Buggeroo]

Am I right in the assumption that a faulty HD can actually make my system freeze up? One of my HDs are sometimes acting quite strange, in that most of the time it seems to work fine, but sometimes when i try to use it the system stops responding and the Hd light is constantly on. Sometimes it starts working again, but most often it does not and I am forced to power off the machine. I have for a while had some stability issues with my comp. and tried different approaches to determine the cause of this and now I am fairly sure it must be the drive. Am I totally wrong thinking that a bad hd can crash my system?

 

[edfair]

Yes, they can totally lock up your system. Or they can slow down your system. Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.com

Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply.

Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[Guest_imported]

sounds like you need to add more RAM. the hard drive operating constantly like that is a sign of your system swiching page files from the HDD. on some slower systems it does seem like your computer has locked up. the more RAM the less HD page transfer. also, run scandisc to check if you have bad sectors on your drive, that will slow it down a bit also

cheers, Laborde

 

[pebe]

I have recently had the same problem with a DVD drive. I had frequent crashes which were unexplainable. Then twice when I went to boot up, the system was held up for a long time when the Bios got to checking the CD drives. The first time it managed to continue and crashed later. The second time it froze at the CD drive check.

I disconnected the DVD drive and for the last 3 months I have had no more crashes.

I wonder if the DVD was randomly putting out an interrupt, and could not answer when the CPU replied, because of a hardware fault?

 

[hotfusion]

Just another idea to throw into the mix: Could certain virus activity cause these symptoms? My suggestions are what I would try myself. If incorrect, I welcome corrections to my rather limited knowledge. Andy.