Will A Failing Harddrive

will a failing harddrive lock up a computer so even if i press power switch it seems not to turn on?

i seem to hear clicking but no turn on

 

A hard drive consists of many parts; mechanical, electrical and electro-mechanical involving power and data. So a failing drive can result in a wide variety of symptoms.

All drives tick. This is when the read/write arm hits the end stops as it swings the read/write head back and forth. If the ticking is much louder than normal, or much more frequent, that could indicate a failing or corrupt drive where the R/W head is frantically searching for the next data block, but can't find it.

If the drive developed a serious short in its power circuits, I suppose that could prevent the computer from powering on as it would be shorting out the power supply which "should" then shut down as a safety precaution. But then you should not hear any clicks.

Since the initial boot process involves the computer going through (and passing) POST (power-on self test) where it checks for RAM, CPU, graphics, and various I/O functions well before it even looks for a boot drive, if the drive was bad, you typically would see an error message shortly after powering on, but before the OS starts to boot.

 

i put in another drive and it seems to work ok-maybe ill try for 40 times in a row and then use it as i did, if it works

the old drive is smallish,a sata the call them?

thanks

 

SATA has nothing to do with the size. That is the type of interface and cable connection it uses. The old type was ATA, also called IDE, EIDE or more recently, PATA.

 

its about 4 inch by 3 adata drive su800 solid state

it seems to be garbage

 

some reviews at amazon

"This is where things got interesting. The drive apparently failed to the point where the bios would recognize it but windows wouldn't load. I then proceeded to install it on another working machine to see if I can format the drive. The interesting thing is that that machine wouldn't even want to boot. I tried this with another machine and the same thing. My final remedy was to install it on the original machine and try to run the windows installer from USB and then try to install windows that way. No luck. There must be some critical failure when mounting the drive that prevents the OS from even operating."""


https://www.amazon.com/product-revi...r&reviewerType=all_reviews#reviews-filter-bar

what a nightmare

 

it came on ok 30 plus times with a new harddrive
i guess ill keep it and put on xp or win 8 which will let my old scanner run

 

i used windows 10 instead and it was doing update--i should have used hibernate

got impatient and just unplugged it,later turned it on and it wouldnt start as before.....until i took out hardrive and it would start without a harddrive-so maybe it needs a new power supply?

im sick of dealing with it,i guess

is there an advantage of running a computer with no drive and just using that adaptor thing with a harddrive?maybe too slow

 

maybe if i unplugged the dvd the damn thing would work moreso