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Failing Hard Drive

Discussion in 'Technology' started by 4REphotographer, Mar 8, 2013.

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  1. 4REphotographer

    4REphotographer F1 Veteran

    Oct 22, 2006
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    #1 4REphotographer, Mar 8, 2013
    Whats the symptoms of a failing drive? I've never had a drive fail before so I'm not sure if my problems are with the HDD or not. The last couple of days my computer has been more sluggish than usual, yesterday morning I woke up and it was entirely unusable, half the programs wouldn't open, couldn't even get task manager to run, took minutes to pull up "my computer" in explorer. Last night I got tired of messing with it and did a clean install of W7, I backed up the most important files to my 2nd drive. Starting to get things moved over and the computer feels more sluggish than it should, just having multiple tabs open is slowing things down and I'm no where near full capacity on CPU or RAM usage.
     
  2. David_S

    David_S F1 World Champ
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    #2 David_S, Mar 8, 2013
    That's usually a pretty defeatist move. In all the years I've used and/or administered boxes with Windows products, I think I've had to do that twice. Seen more Apple OS re-installs than Windows.

    As you say you're still slow, I'd either guess you have some form of virus/malware, or a hardware/bad memory issue.
     
  3. 4REphotographer

    4REphotographer F1 Veteran

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    #3 4REphotographer, Mar 8, 2013
    It is, but I don't have the time to mess with it, it was completely unusable last night and I had work I had to get done. Can't be malware since it's still slow after the clean install. I ordered up a new HDD, even if that's not the actual problem I needed a new one anyway as a back up. I'll swap everything over tomorrow and see if it's any better.
     
  4. Schatten

    Schatten F1 World Champ
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    #4 Schatten, Mar 8, 2013
    Reinstall isn't a solution these days.

    Need to look at other symptoms, possibly other hardware issues. For instance, is this a laptop or desktop? What kind? Running hot? Is it locked away in a cabinet without any kind of air flow? What about free space on the installed partition itself?
     
  5. 4REphotographer

    4REphotographer F1 Veteran

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    #5 4REphotographer, Mar 8, 2013
    Custom desktop, 2500k overclocked to 4.5ghz, 8GB ram and Asus P8P67 motherboard. 500GB main HDD with about 90GB free and a 1TB secondary drive. Out in the open with good airflow, I built it about a year and a half ago and haven't touched it since, never had any issues, temp or otherwise.
     
  6. Schimpf

    Schimpf Karting

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    #6 Schimpf, Mar 8, 2013
    most obvious is a clicking. SMART doesn't do anything & is a waste of space.
    Slower speeds & blue screens also can be a sign but can also be software issue.

    I image all my drives anymore & keep the important stuff on backups. So simply reimage when things get abnormal. Spinrite & putting the drive in the freezer can get a failed drive to work.
    Spinrite can also get the drive to flag the bad sectors & use it's spares. Other programs can do the same, I just default to that one.

    reread your post - probably reinstall. Sounds like software
     

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