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(IBM deskstar 76gb) Bad HDD or was that a virus?

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pnrenton

Technical User
Oct 22, 2002
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I had been doing a lot of web surfing that day. That evening I noticed the computer freeze-up when it went into screen saver mode. The HDD would make a series of clicks and then pause. This would go on and on requiring a hard reboot to stop it. This same computer freeze with an endless cycle of HDD clicks and pauses would occur anytime I entered screensaver mode, or ran any disk checking utility such as defrag, Norton disk doctor, Norton antivirus. The computer would freeze at the same location when performing antivitus or disk doctor. I found the file that caused the problem. It was one jpg file from my digital camera that I had downloaded 10 months ago. Everytime the computer came across this file the computer would freeze. Otherwise the computer worked fine. I tried everything to delete it but without success. I even tried to reformat the HDD (WinXP Pro) and the computer again froze up with the clicks and pause cycle occuring during reformat. I finally used an IBM disk utility that told me that a sector was damaged and then asked me if I would like to repair it. I repaired it. After this I was able to reformat the HDD and reinstall WinXP Pro. It's been 3 days now and the computer works flawlessly. My question: Was that a virus (Norton AV did not detect it) or is my HDD about to go bad (Do I need to replace the HDD)?
 
Firstly whatever does or doesn't happen good practice says "back it up now"
Your IBM should be covered by a 3 year warranty thats all changing soon as IBM will probably follow others in reducing there costs by reducing cover to one year.
Make sure you have smart disk enabled in the bios to give you forewarning.
Does IBM's tool report bad sectors now after the fix?
Have you run the full health check?
Fingers crossed, you may well have retrieved the hard drive and have no further problems but don't forget to backup regularly., Martin
Replying helps further our knowledge, without comment leaves us wondering.
 
A good leason on backing up. I did back up all my data prior to the reformat.
The IBM disk test showed no errors after the fix.
Thanks for your input.
 
NTfs can make a file undeletable. 0-length corrupted files affect the MFT and the only way to fix it is to format.

the other issue is the clicks. Ibm has a history of failure
as per this link:

I have a thread asking input from IBM users
thread751-438815


IBM sold their harddrive section of their company and you won't be able to RMA the drive or talk to tech support till after Jan 6,2003 you will deal with Hitashi

the clicks are a bad bad bad omen.
start looking for a new drive.....yours is going to fail soon.
 
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