HD trouble?

[J-DOGG]

hi, I've been having computer trouble lately, and i thought i would ask you guys since you've helped me lots in the past,

I have an older pc at home which was running excellent and smooth. Just recently i've put it on a network through router. Everything worked fine until one day it was amazingly slow, now whenever i bott it up, its the most slow ever. Weird clicking noises have been commin from my tower , the same as when your pc kicks back into gear when its in sleep most. (it just gives that click, but many times now). It's almost like the HD doesnt wanna run. NOTE: i can still acces the PC, mouse spped is quick, but acces to files and loading take about 2 hours.

what can this be? Can leaving my pc on for long periods of time have done this?

 

[Dtere]

Theoretically, leaving your computer on for long periods of time has not been proven to harm it. (although there is usually life spans on Harddrives).

Few things i can think of, from experience with this type of problem.
1. RAM
2. PCI card causing troubles (modem or network usually)
3. Virus
4. Harddrive (least likely)

Try booting your system with as few hardware components as possible. What I mean by this is: take out all PCI cards, use one stick of RAM.
At my work we had a computer come in with this exact same problem (took 2 hrs to load up windows) and we finally found that a modem PCI card caused the problem, it just went bad for some reason or another.

 

[J-DOGG]

well i pulled out my network card like you said, it was my most recent perchase in order to network, still i got frequent clicking noises comming for the HD, it still taking alot of time to acces the pc. I had tried removing RAM before this meg becasue it work on other pcs i worked on n the past but it didnt help. So im not really sure anymore what to do.

I really think its the HD because of the evidence i have:

-Many clicking noises from HD
-Processor up to speed, keeping up with mouse movement
-Ram is said to be all up to par in the pc system
- and its not a virus because both pc's would have received it. And viruses through networks of this kind of magnitude are no frequent (to my knowledge)
-No errors poping up on startup.

***It did say once that some sectors of my HD could be corrupted***

 

[Dtere]

Is there any chance that you can reformat the harddrive?

 

[J-DOGG]

Yeah man, thats not a problem at all, but im trying to find out a way i wont need to, i can try with just the second HD i got in it already. and c what happens....

 

[1JadedJen]

My friend came across this problem, one day out of the blue her computer made clicking noises and refused to load. Just sat there clicking and doing nothing. We had her go out and by a cheap 60 buck HD and swapped the old one out for her. Fixed the problem right away. She did lose all her old stuff on the old HD but she is not very computer literate and just likes to do email and check up on her favorite websites so she didn't mind at all. Set her mac up with an updated OS system and everything and she hasn't had any problems since. We did keep her old hard drive and put it in our computer and the same clicking refusing to boot thing happened, we also wanted to see if any info could be retrieved just for the sake of tweeking with it but we haven't had a lot of time to mess with it so I am not sure about getting old info back if the HD is really messed.
Anyway, she was happy because she had had a computer tech come out to look at it and his analysis was that she should buy a new computer just cause she got it in '99. Boy was she glad to hear she just needed a new HD and not a whole new couple hundred (or in MAC case, couple thousand) dollar computer

 

[J-DOGG]

Thanx for the quick reply all!!! really helps alot to know im not the only one with pc problems! lol.....anyways, im gonna keep tinkering around with it and see what gives, if anyone else has any other suggestions please feel free to give them, ill take anything...

In reply to retreiving that info, it is possible, and i have done it, it simply takes a few hours. If your problem is identicle to mine, you will need a little patience

J/W: Is it true that the magnetic cores inside HD's sometimes stick together and allow it to work like CRAP?? J/w if this is true........