Last September I bought my 3rd Dell PC (an XPSB100r). For the first time this PC exhibited a "refuse to boot" symptom where the startup sequence would just 'hang' say 30% of the time. Then one day, at the same refusal point, my hard drive (45GB Ultra ATA) started making this awful grinding noise and that was it - couldn't reboot and couldn't reformat.
Dell replaced it with a 70GB drive but that exhibited the same problem and I ended up having to reformat a month or so later (with some reluctance from the system to format over the bad sectors).
Anyway, after two more times the startup hang still occurs and I'll still get the grinding noise (but no complete failure). Norton utilities can't diagnose the problem (either skips over the bad sector, or hangs trying to read it).
Do I have a harddrive problem that I unluckily inherited twice on two separate drives - or is it something else? If it's truly a surface defect, could I mark it as bad and just get on with my life and sacrifice a meg or two?
Dell wants me to start re-seating all the motherboard components and other time exhasutive activities.
Thanks for any sanity checks!
Dell replaced it with a 70GB drive but that exhibited the same problem and I ended up having to reformat a month or so later (with some reluctance from the system to format over the bad sectors).
Anyway, after two more times the startup hang still occurs and I'll still get the grinding noise (but no complete failure). Norton utilities can't diagnose the problem (either skips over the bad sector, or hangs trying to read it).
Do I have a harddrive problem that I unluckily inherited twice on two separate drives - or is it something else? If it's truly a surface defect, could I mark it as bad and just get on with my life and sacrifice a meg or two?
Dell wants me to start re-seating all the motherboard components and other time exhasutive activities.
Thanks for any sanity checks!
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