I was wondering if this is a hard drive issue? 2

[666wolverine]

I think my HD is in the beginning stages of death. The symptoms that I am having is that when my wife is playing her Sims 2 game the HD will start spooling up and down for a little while. This happens for no reason at all. I had it open last night while it was running and I was looking at the cables to see if maybe one of them was loose and while doing so the HD started to spool again while I was messing with the cables. I'm going to try and replace the ribbon cable first and see if this stops the up and down spooling. I replace the power supply about 4 months or so ago as well. I'd like to fix this issue before the HD takes a dump once and for all.

 

[paulstorey]

Hi, how much space is free on the drive, has it been defragged lately and how much ram is in the machine?

 

[666wolverine]

It's an 80 gig HDD. It has about 52.9 free gigs on it. I just ran scandisk, defragged it, ran adaware, spysweep. I have about 1 gb of ram on it. It just started making a roaring type of a noise as well. It roars for just a bit then it goes away.

Anxiety is here to stay no matter how much you wish it away!

 

[edfair]

The longer you wait to get it backed up, the more problems you'll have with it, and the less data you'll eventually recover.
When you do start to clean it off, keep it cool.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[paulstorey]

sounds like a failing hard disk. When you ran scandisk, did you check and run a complete surface scan and if so did it show any bad sectors (a sure fire way of a failing hard disk). As edfair suggested, make sure you have a backup of any important data.

What make of hard disk is it? Reason I ask is most manufacturers now have diagnostics tools on their websites for picking up failing hard disks so check with the manufacturer. Also some drives are under a 3 year warranty so it could still be covered (worth checking)

 

[666wolverine]

I don't know the type of HDD but it's whatever Dell uses for their machines. I think I read somewhere that they use Seagate. I did run scandisk and it didn't come up with anything abnormal. I don't know if there is another way of running it or not. I just used the scandisk utility from system tools to run it. Please let me know if there is another way to run it to check bad sectors more throughly. Thanks for all the help.

Anxiety is here to stay no matter how much you wish it away!