Sporadic behavior extremely unusual

My computer (which ive recentely put together in the last year) recentely was having hiccups. Which was strange as im running a 3.0 processor with most of the top of the line components and in the amount of time ive had the computer i had been experiencing no such problems. Let me describe the errors:


When i say "Computer having hiccups" i mean every once in a while when running an application i would hear loading and clicks in my computer (seeming to come from the harddrive) this click i would hear would trigger the computer to freeze momentarily for a few seconds and then continue.

I just thought maybe i was running my computer too much and continued without much thought, or maybe that it was a hardware problem and its just been banged around too much.


Until last night the hiccups became alot more frequent, until one point it would freeze every 5 seconds for 30 or more seconds and i had to shut it down by taking the cord out of the back. When i booted it back up it took almost 5 whole minutes to get to the Welcome screen. Which then took another 5 minutes to load up everything on startup (which isnt much and with running a with a 3.0 it reguarly would never slow it down)

So i ran it in safemode and still 5 minutes to boot up without the startup programs and still taking 5 minutes to get to the welcome screen.


Im on it right now and isnt seem to be having the same sort of hiccups, more of i cant run any programs sufficientely or when i try to look thru my hardrive or control panel it will frequentely lock up.

I've tried getting rid of many programs, running spybot and ad-aware, i defragged my hardrive in safemode overnight, opened up my computer to see if there was any cords not plugged into the hardrive and checked for any sort of damage to the components. Still im getting the same extremely slow and incapable computer.

Does anyone have any thoughts on what i should further do?

A while back some IBM drives had a problem like that known as the "click of death". Your hard drive is all but dead. You'll have to get a new one.

Pull the hard drive off the chain and boot from a live CD.  Start doing stuff on it.  See if it experiences any symptoms.

I'm about to put a LiveCD iso on a cd and boot from it, Just to see if it is indeed the hardrive being the culprit and not any other hardware.

But from what i would like to boggle it down to is  is it a hardware problem, or is it a software problem. I wouldn't like to get a new hardrive when i could just reformat. Or could it even be a virus.

I have a Maxtor SATA Hardrive and it is no longer making the clicking sound. (Although this could be because before it can run anything that takes more cpu usage then an internet browser it locks up and doesnt get the chance to click)

Maxtor drives are very very rarely prone to the click of death. A Maxtor drive will usually begin causing fatal errors before it dies, and start randomly generating bad blocks. Usually you're at the end of the drive when your OS panicks on boot or fsck finds the same error every boot sequence and fails to correct. A windows installation on a bad Maxtor drive usually gets a shitty block in the boot sector pretty early and fails to even try to boot after that.

I had someone else look at it and when we ran chkdsk /f to have windows check the drive. After 3 checks and alot of reboots it seems to not have any more problems and no more clicks or heavy load sounds coming from the hardrive. I'm very glad i will not need to purchase a new hardrive.

chkdsk /f isn't much proof of anything. What you want to do is to run something like SpinRite, then also check the drive's SMART data.

>>6
that, however, sounds exactly like a dying Maxtor drive

Requesting download for SpinRite.

(80$ upfront without a free download sample = Goodluck)

Dammit man, are your data so useless you're going to risk having it on a dying drive? If the drive has been making strange noises it never did before, you should do yourself a favour and get a new drive as soon as you can. Your data is far more precious and valuable than a cheap hard disk drive.

250GB ~ 300GB drives are a great deal at the moment. Use the dying of your drive as an excuse to grab one. Make sure you check out the prices. They are probably much cheaper than you thought they were.