Eminent Failure of Hard Drive, but which one?!?!?

[ITDEFX]

Ok a few months ago I posted that 1 of out 4 of my hard drives was making a clicking noise every now and then. Despite suggestions of test transferring a gig of data between drives and see which drive hangs to pin point the problem, disconnecting each drive one by one and booting the main drive without the others, the problem seemed to go away. Yesterday morning I started up my machine and as soon as the windows boot screen came up, the drive started clicking like crazy and my system restarted. I shut down the system and checked the insides only to find everything was still good and gave it another hour before restarting. No problems but I did hear a few clicks here and there.

Just a few minutes ago my drive started clicking like crazy, but then stopped. There was no problems or freezes with windows.

I am thinking the drive is about to crash. But which one?!?!

I have 4 maxtor drives (yea yea, but they have been good so far).
C: 80 gig
D: 60 gig
E: 200 gig
G: 300 gig

F: is the dvd burner.

I am assuming it's the 80 gig or the 60 gig since they are the oldest. I believe they were bought back in 2002/2003. The 200 gig was in late 2004 and the 300 gig was in late 2005.

Most of the important data is on the 200/300 gig drives. The 80/60 gigs only have XP Home/XP Pro, games, and main applications. I can easily reinstall those programs down the road and the games aren't a biggie if I loose the save game files. The 200/300 gig drives have all the work from the past 4 years on them. I could back up some of the stuff on DVD discs, but some of these files are 1-2 gigs in size (I do a lot of video/graphics work).

Any idea which drive could it be?

[Serik]

What kind of budget do you have to invest in new storage? If at all possible, I'd just go out and buy some new HDs to save yourself the hassle of dealing with a crashed drive.

At the very least, you can a 350 GB external drive or something to house your important data while you sort the problem out.

I was going to suggest testing the drives one by one, by disconnecting the others, but it seems you've already done that...

[mguiddy]

Run your computer with the side off. When it starts clicking touch each hard drive. You should be able to feel the clicking. There may be some software that could help but this seems simpler to me.

[daphatty]

Does your Mobo support S.M.A.R.T.? If so, enable it. This might help you figure out which drive is failing. Also, I believe Maxtor has a software app that can help you isolate a failing drive. Check their site if you still can.

[ITDEFX]

What kind of budget do you have to invest in new storage? If at all possible, I'd just go out and buy some new HDs to save yourself the hassle of dealing with a crashed drive.

At the very least, you can a 350 GB external drive or something to house your important data while you sort the problem out.

I was going to suggest testing the drives one by one, by disconnecting the others, but it seems you've already done that...

I am kind of short on money right now(had to make car repairs). I saw a 500 gig maxtor drive for 120 at microcenter a few weeks back. As for disconnecting it, yea I did that but it is being very sneaky about being detected. I also thought about my hard drives not getting enough power, but they have been running fine off of the 550 watt ps for years with no problems.

Run your computer with the side off. When it starts clicking touch each hard drive. You should be able to feel the clicking. There may be some software that could help but this seems simpler to me.

Tried that but the system noise is very high. And this is the one of those Antec cases that suppose to keep things quite and it did, until I added new drives.

Does your Mobo support S.M.A.R.T.? If so, enable it. This might help you figure out which drive is failing. Also, I believe Maxtor has a software app that can help you isolate a failing drive. Check their site if you still can.


I heard of that, but my Mobo is the Abit Vt7 series. It was the last generation (I believe) of mobo's with AGP slots. I should have waited another month or so as I could have gotten a PCI-E motherboard and video card cheaper.
I am currently running SeaTools for Windows and running the diagnoses program.... so far it's taking a long time and it's not detecting anything...so far. :pray: but I am sure this doesn't mean anything as drives usually can fail without warning.

Had two hard drives fail on me 5 years ago. They were generics (the labeled said Generic). The drives were fine for a few months then they clicked on me and bam, useless.

[mguiddy]

Tried that but the system noise is very high. And this is the one of those Antec cases that suppose to keep things quite and it did, until I added new drives.


Still seems like you should be able to feel the physical click. I had an external drive fail and when it would click I could feel the thud when the head would reset.

[darthbudge]

Here is what logic tells me. If you were booting it up and it starts clicking, the bad disc is the one that you were booting.

Get a program called MiniPE, you are gonna have to get a torrent for this, and then burn that image to a disc and boot it up.

It has a ton of useful programs and several of them will analyze your HDD's use those to try to figure out what it is.

[ITDEFX]

Still seems like you should be able to feel the physical click. I had an external drive fail and when it would click I could feel the thud when the head would reset.

Ok, I will try that next time.


Here is what logic tells me. If you were booting it up and it starts clicking, the bad disc is the one that you were booting.

Get a program called MiniPE, you are gonna have to get a torrent for this, and then burn that image to a disc and boot it up.

It has a ton of useful programs and several of them will analyze your HDD's use those to try to figure out what it is.


I will look for that tonight. I finished seatools on all the drives except the 300 gig one as that is an SATA drive and the program keeps crashing when trying to test it. It took 90+ minutes each drive. All of them passed except C: Hmm that is giving me a strong indication (and the other day's reboot/click during boot up)

So that's fairly good news as I can dump any important files to the 300 gig.

oh and this is my messy set up :(
http://i108.photobucket.com/albums/n26/ITDEFX101/100_7161.jpg