Is my Hard Drive Dead? An opinion required here...

My main PC I use for gaming and such has started giving random freezes;

It just freezes the current screen as though I'm looking at an image of my screen, I can move mouse around but that's it, clicking anything does nothing. On a side note, if there's something animated, like a progress bar, the animation still happens (as in the pulse along the bar, not the bar's progress)

When I then do a hard restart via the restart button, in the post screen it does CPU, Memory and Optical Drive checks (They're on IDE) but when it gets to point where it should check HDD's (SATA's 2, 1 250gig and 1 80gig) nothing happens and it'll stay on that screen indefinitely.

If I power off at this point and power up again, the PC will more often than not start with the "Didn't shut down properly" menu beforehand. However, on occasions I will get the blue screen flash up and it's back to start of previous paragraph.

I'm using Vista Home Premium and it's installed on the 250gig HDD, I've run the disk checker tool and on occasions it's finished with no clear way to see if anything was fixed. So I installed Vista on the 80gig and run the disk check from there on the 250. It said it had found errors and fixed them so now back on the 250 and it's starting to play up again.

I'm torn between the 250 is on it's last legs or possibly the motherboard is on it's way out, since it can't read either of the SATAs if I hard reset button it.

In hindsight, maybe I should have give it a few days on the 80 using Vista but I honestly thought that the check disk had fixed it and I restored the 80 back to how it was.

Any insight would be greatly appreciated, I'm already considering a new HDD, but would just like to know if it's possible it's the motherboard?

 

It could be the motherboard. But do the SATA drives show up in BIOS before boot? Depending on the hard drive manufacturer, you could burn a bootable diagnostic disk and see if it finds any hard drive errors.

 

If the PC is going to start, the both drives show up.

If it locks up while Vista running, and I use the reset button on tower, the opticals show (IDE) but it stops post process at all SATAs until I turn off power via front button (instant off during this part of start up) then turn back on and it boots fine most the time (Sometimes, blue screen once then successful boot up)

 

my hard drive is dead..can i recover it?

 

I am not sure why that is happening. It may help to update the chipset drivers. Was the disk checker tool you used a bootable diagnostic disk?

 

Please start a new thread in hardware.

 

I'm 99% certain it's the latest chipset drivers, I installed them not so long ago.. The checker tool I used was Window's own one.

You mentioned a bootable disk checker earlier. I don't want to seem lazy but could you recommend one to me please? As I was typing this the whole PC locked up again... I'm using Firefox latest (poss beta can't remember) and lucky for me it saved page! Opening Firefox at times seem to cause this lock up, but I can play a game for a few hours without problems.

Windows solution centre just reported problems with explorer.exe but (and I'm genuinely not surprised here!) has no solution!

I'll try looking for a disc checker in mean time on my laptop. But would be very greatful if you could point me in the right direction (preferably a free one too! )

 

You can burn the following iso's with Imgburn or anything that can burn a bootable iso image.

Depending on your hard drive manufacturer.

Western Digital

Seagate

UBCD has a whole list of generic and manufacturer diagnostic hard drive software.

http://majorgeeks.com/Ultimate_Boot_CD_d4981.html

 

since you said vista was working fine on the 80 gig, it might be your 250 gig hdd might be dying (does it make any klicking noises?? i'm asking because about 10 years ago i had a 2 gig western digital eide hdd die on me after about a month of random klicking):cry