hard drive failure??

[biostarbill]

I have a PC with a "crash" problem. The symptoms are as follows:

At totally irregular intervals the screen simply freezes. This may occur in the midst of productive work.
Everything stops dead with the existing image retained on the monitor, mouse pointer disappears.
If screen saver is on, it freezes. There is no hard drive activity (LED non on, or flashing). The only
way out of this situation is forced power down (hold power button depressed for 4-5 secones, or unplug
from power source. Of course any data that had not been saved is lost. Normally, when unit is powered up,
the power up sequence is normal. One time only, recently when attempting a standard power up, it failed
completely. There was a clicking sound from the hard drive (as if attempting to index).

The hardware and operating system is as follows:

Operating System System Model
Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2 (build 2600) VIA Technologies, Inc. KM400-8237
Enclosure Type: Desktop
Processor Main Circuit Board
1.85 gigahertz AMD Athlon XP
128 kilobyte primary memory cache
512 kilobyte secondary memory cache Board: BIOSTAR N7VIZ - KM400-8235
Bus Clock: 166 megahertz
BIOS: Phoenix Technologies, LTD 6.00 PG
09/01/2003
Drives Memory Modules
WDC WD800JB-00ETA0 [Hard drive] (80.03 GB) -- 736 Megabytes Installed Memory
drive 0, s/n WD-WCAHL4833075, rev 77.07W77, Slot 'A0' has 256 MB
76.84 Gigabytes Usable Hard Drive Capacity Slot 'A1' has 512 MB
57.02 Gigabytes Hard Drive Free Space

RW-5224 [CD-ROM drive]
3.5" format removeable media [Floppy drive]

 

[burtsbees]

Freezing like that could be the hard drive or CPU overheating (blow out the dustbunnies), but from the clicking sound you describe, it is probably the actuator arm clicking (hard drive). If the clicking is constant (like 1-2 every second...click-click-click...), then the hard drive is toast. Sometimes this can be fixed by replacing the controller board with one from the exact same model, in order to save the data. This doesn't sound like a head crash, so you should be able to replace the board if the data is important enough, and you don't have a backup...

Burt

 

[Grenage]

It does sound like the hard drive is failing. If you can get it running again, back up your data.

"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area" - Major Mike Shearer