hard drive 'ticks' then computer locks up

  • Thread starter Thread starter Ryan
  • Start date Start date
R

Ryan

I have a Western Digital WDC1000BB 100GB drive that is giving me
trouble. It's the only drive in my freshly installed WinXP system.
When I was installing XP I let the installer format the drive. When
it got about half way done, it would lock up, and I could hear a very
soft tick-tick-tick coming from the hard drive. I finally got past
this point by letting do a quick format.

Then later I can chkdsk /f to find and fix that error. WinXP had to
reboot and run the scan before booting into windows. It gets about
half way done and then locks up with the ticking sound.

I wasn't too concerned about it until I was doing some video work with
large files the other night. At some point the computer locked up and
I could hear the ticking, it must have tried to use that bad spot on
the drive.

What can I do? It's no longer under warranty. Is there a utility
from WD that might find the bad spot and mark it as bad so Windows
doesn't try to use it?

Thanks,
-Ryan
 
Ryan said:
I have a Western Digital WDC1000BB 100GB drive that is giving me
trouble. It's the only drive in my freshly installed WinXP system.
When I was installing XP I let the installer format the drive. When
it got about half way done, it would lock up, and I could hear a very
soft tick-tick-tick coming from the hard drive. I finally got past
this point by letting do a quick format.

Then later I can chkdsk /f to find and fix that error. WinXP had to
reboot and run the scan before booting into windows. It gets about
half way done and then locks up with the ticking sound.

I wasn't too concerned about it until I was doing some video work with
large files the other night. At some point the computer locked up and
I could hear the ticking, it must have tried to use that bad spot on
the drive.

What can I do? It's no longer under warranty. Is there a utility
from WD that might find the bad spot and mark it as bad so Windows
doesn't try to use it?

Thanks,
-Ryan
Click to expand...

replace it
 
Ryan said:
I have a Western Digital WDC1000BB 100GB drive that is giving me
trouble. It's the only drive in my freshly installed WinXP system.
When I was installing XP I let the installer format the drive. When
it got about half way done, it would lock up, and I could hear a very
soft tick-tick-tick coming from the hard drive. I finally got past
this point by letting do a quick format.

Then later I can chkdsk /f to find and fix that error. WinXP had to
reboot and run the scan before booting into windows. It gets about
half way done and then locks up with the ticking sound.

I wasn't too concerned about it until I was doing some video work with
large files the other night. At some point the computer locked up and
I could hear the ticking,
Click to expand...
it must have tried to use that bad spot on the drive.
Click to expand...

Probably not. Likely another spot, previously good, that went sour after
the drive wrote to it. Bad spots that get written to usually get replaced or
return to good due to the drive's internal sector checking/sparing mechanism.
What can I do? It's no longer under warranty. Is there a utility from
WD that might find the bad spot and mark it as bad so Windows doesn't
try to use it?
Click to expand...

The drive should do it by itself. You only need to encourage it.
Find the file that has the bad block and overwrite it (may be more difficult
than it sounds, you may have to delete it and temporarily copy lots of data to
re-occupy the deleted space) or if it's not in a file use a sector editor and
search all sectors until it hits it and then overwrite the offending sector.
 
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