Recently my hard drive has been exhibiting very scary behavior. (My hard drive is a 60GB ATA/100 7200rpm Maxtor model #5T060H6. I am running Windows XP Pro on my system.)
Anyway, this behavior first started yesterday afternoon, and has since occurred at least 4 or 5 times. What happens is: while I am in the middle of something, my system will suddenly hang. The screen freezes, the mouse cursor can still move around, but it is frozen as an hourglass. I can still highlight the window that is in focus, but any windows that are out of focus cannot come into focus. I can't close anything, I can't get the Start menu to pop-up, I can't even get to the Task Manager using Ctrl+Alt+Del.
During this time, my hard drive activity light will come on for about 10 seconds, then go off for 5, then come on steady for 10 seconds, then go off for about 5, over and over again as my system hangs. In the midst of this unending cycle, every once in a while I will hear my hard drive give a very scary, audible "CLICK". It's definitely not the same type of ticking that happens while the drive is reading or writing...no, this type of noise is just one single scary-sounding "CLICK"...it does not sound good at all.
The only way to get out of this is for me to do a hard restart by pushing the restart button on my system chassis. Then of course ScanDisk will run as Windows XP boots up because my system did not restart properly, and it will sometimes recover files from lost clusters. My computer makes it back to Windows XP just fine and it runs normally for about an hour or two, but it is inevitable that out of nowhere, my system will hang again, and my hard drive will once again commence its scary hiccup ritual, at which point I will immediately do a hard restart (I'm afraid that if I let it go for too long the drive will eventually destroy itself or something!).
So last night, I decided to backup all my important data to my second hard drive, using PowerQuest DataKeeper 5. So now at least I have a cloned set of my "Documents and Settings" folder on a separate volume, which makes me feel a little more secure. But I still don't like the idea of losing my primary hard drive! I'm afraid it's dying or something. I realize that Maxtor has a very good warranty on its hard drives, and that is why I bought a Maxtor drive, but this hard drive is only about 9 months old...how could it be dying already??
I have tried various things to try to help, but I don't really know what is wrong so at this point all attempts are pretty much just shots in the dark. Here is what I have done (in order):
1. Ran Norton DiskDoctor 2002 during Windows XP startup.
2. Ran Norton WinDoctor 2002.
3. Converted the drive from FAT32 to NTFS using the convert.exe tool that comes with Windows XP.
4. Defragmented the drive using Norton Speed Disk 2002.
5. Opened up the chassis and replaced the rounded ATA/100 data cable with a regular unrounded ATA/100 data cable.
Anyway, this behavior first started yesterday afternoon, and has since occurred at least 4 or 5 times. What happens is: while I am in the middle of something, my system will suddenly hang. The screen freezes, the mouse cursor can still move around, but it is frozen as an hourglass. I can still highlight the window that is in focus, but any windows that are out of focus cannot come into focus. I can't close anything, I can't get the Start menu to pop-up, I can't even get to the Task Manager using Ctrl+Alt+Del.
During this time, my hard drive activity light will come on for about 10 seconds, then go off for 5, then come on steady for 10 seconds, then go off for about 5, over and over again as my system hangs. In the midst of this unending cycle, every once in a while I will hear my hard drive give a very scary, audible "CLICK". It's definitely not the same type of ticking that happens while the drive is reading or writing...no, this type of noise is just one single scary-sounding "CLICK"...it does not sound good at all.
The only way to get out of this is for me to do a hard restart by pushing the restart button on my system chassis. Then of course ScanDisk will run as Windows XP boots up because my system did not restart properly, and it will sometimes recover files from lost clusters. My computer makes it back to Windows XP just fine and it runs normally for about an hour or two, but it is inevitable that out of nowhere, my system will hang again, and my hard drive will once again commence its scary hiccup ritual, at which point I will immediately do a hard restart (I'm afraid that if I let it go for too long the drive will eventually destroy itself or something!).
So last night, I decided to backup all my important data to my second hard drive, using PowerQuest DataKeeper 5. So now at least I have a cloned set of my "Documents and Settings" folder on a separate volume, which makes me feel a little more secure. But I still don't like the idea of losing my primary hard drive! I'm afraid it's dying or something. I realize that Maxtor has a very good warranty on its hard drives, and that is why I bought a Maxtor drive, but this hard drive is only about 9 months old...how could it be dying already??
I have tried various things to try to help, but I don't really know what is wrong so at this point all attempts are pretty much just shots in the dark. Here is what I have done (in order):
1. Ran Norton DiskDoctor 2002 during Windows XP startup.
2. Ran Norton WinDoctor 2002.
3. Converted the drive from FAT32 to NTFS using the convert.exe tool that comes with Windows XP.
4. Defragmented the drive using Norton Speed Disk 2002.
5. Opened up the chassis and replaced the rounded ATA/100 data cable with a regular unrounded ATA/100 data cable.
:tongue: 
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