Harddrive freezes - reboot and bios defaults - help

[Juleswc]

any advice would be fab on this one please folks.

I've had this problem for about 6 months, but it seems to be getting slightly worse..

The Problem : whilist using Vista - can be internet, DVD, photoshop etc - the pc freezes and then about 20 seconds later I hear a struggling noise from harddrive, the screen then goes off and it reboots - however I can only get windows to work again if I turn the system off and on and then do into bio and hit optimized defaults etc and then it will reboot.

I'm concerned as this is getting slightly more frequent.. any advice? new hard drive?

I'm running Vista Home, 500gb sata drive, 2gb of ram

Thanks folks,

Jules

 

[Freestone]

It certainly sounds like a hard drive issue, though it could be other issues, i.e. an intermittent power supply problem or flaky ram.

To diagnose the hard drive, go to the drive manufacturer's website and download their diagnostics for the drive model you have. Be aware that thorough tests can take a few hours or more to run.

But before doing anything, I highly suggest backing up any data you can't afford to lose while you still have pain free access to it.

 

[goombawaho]

Exactly what Freestone said: backup like NOW and then run the diagnostics.

 

[kjv1611]

If it is your hard drive making the noises you describe, and not a fan, then it's pretty definite that's the issue. It could still be other things, but noise coming from the hard drive is usually a good (bad) sign of failure. And being that this would be mechanical failure, then it's more likely for you to have an irrecoverable data loss... therefore, data backup is absolutely #1.

For a simple test to see if it's the hard drive, you could (FIRST BACK UP YOUR DATA, REGARDLESS):
1. Take the hard drive out.
2. Boot from a bootable CD - in particular, try a bootable liveCD version of Linux, such as Ubuntu.
3. See if you have any of the same symptoms, noise, etc..
4. You could just play around in the live Operating System from disk for a while to be sure you've given it ample time to test... and in the mean time, you may learn some stuff with a different OS.

 

[Juleswc]

thanks so much for the valued for advice folks! I've now backed everything up and will now attempt to have a good look at the drive! although think to be honest from whats you've said it looks a crook one :-(

Cheers

Jules