Is my harddrive dead, what should I do?

  • Thread starter Thread starter need4greed
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need4greed

I have a WD1600JB. Yesterday my computer crashed and when I rebooted,
everything became really slow. So I powered off (shut down don't work).
And now when I turn on the computer, it stays at the "detecting IDE"
for almost 30 secs. Then finally it would recognize the HD and proceed
to boot up XP. However, normally it takes me 30 secs to boot, now it
takes several mins. Even after window is booted, everything is slow.
The mouse would work fine, but when I press the 'Start' button, it
takes minutes for anything to happen, essentially the system is
useless. Any suggestion?
 
I have a WD1600JB. Yesterday my computer crashed and when I rebooted,
everything became really slow. So I powered off (shut down don't work).
And now when I turn on the computer, it stays at the "detecting IDE"
for almost 30 secs. Then finally it would recognize the HD and proceed
to boot up XP. However, normally it takes me 30 secs to boot, now it
takes several mins. Even after window is booted, everything is slow.
The mouse would work fine, but when I press the 'Start' button, it
takes minutes for anything to happen, essentially the system is
useless. Any suggestion?
Click to expand...

Get a new hard drive, restore OS and data from your backup. Get warranty
replacement for your bad WD1600JB.
 
need4greed said:
I have a WD1600JB. Yesterday my computer crashed and when I rebooted,
everything became really slow. So I powered off (shut down don't work).
And now when I turn on the computer, it stays at the "detecting IDE"
for almost 30 secs. Then finally it would recognize the HD and proceed
to boot up XP. However, normally it takes me 30 secs to boot, now it
takes several mins. Even after window is booted, everything is slow.
The mouse would work fine, but when I press the 'Start' button, it
takes minutes for anything to happen, essentially the system is
useless. Any suggestion?
Click to expand...
Go to Western Digital's web site and get a copy of their disk checking
software.

I suspect some of your BIOS settings have gone amiss; what you describe
doesn't necessarily sound like a hard drive failure to me (although it
could be).
 
need4greed said:
I have a WD1600JB. Yesterday my computer crashed and when I rebooted,
everything became really slow. So I powered off (shut down don't work).
And now when I turn on the computer, it stays at the "detecting IDE"
for almost 30 secs. Then finally it would recognize the HD and proceed
to boot up XP. However, normally it takes me 30 secs to boot, now it
takes several mins. Even after window is booted, everything is slow.
The mouse would work fine, but when I press the 'Start' button, it
takes minutes for anything to happen, essentially the system is
useless. Any suggestion?
Click to expand...

Sounds VERY similar to what happened to me last week.

When I disconnected the problem disk, the system would boot up fine, with no
unusual delays. Plug the faulty disk back in and it went REALLY slowly,
just as you describe.

I booted from a floppy and attempted to do a chkdsk / scandisk, which showed
that one partition (of 4 on the disk) had problems on it.

Using DiskPart, I eventually managed to clone the disk to a spare (which
took around 24 hours on an 80Gb disk, doing a sector by sector copy). The
cloned disk then worked absolutely fine. The original disk gave errors in
the (Maxtor) manufacturer test software, but after doing a low-level format,
no errors were found on subsequent checks.

Not sure whether I could have recovered the partition easier (I did try on
the original after I was happy I had a working clone, but had no success in
recovering the original partition) but making a clone may be an option for
you. I had actually made the clone expecting to then have to rebuild the
partition info or FAT, but when the clone was finished, it worked fine with
no tweaking needed. :oD

HTH.
 
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