Is it the hard drive?

[swiftrr]

Okay, so recently my computer has been just shutting off randomly and occassionally the mouse and keyboard just freeze. Over time this just kept getting worse and worse. Now when I try to boot windows, the comp just shuts off after loading the final bits of the operating system. I managed to get the comp working in safe mode for a little while as I backed up important files. Occassionally it would shut off in safe mode, but less frequently as it did in normal boot. I believe this is a hard drive problem because of the freezing mouse and keyboard and the way that it just shuts off. The hard drive also makes some perhaps abnormal sounds while it is running. Not completely sure.

Should I just get a new hard drive or do you think there's still hope for this drive. Or, is it another compnent's problem. Thanks for your time, I really appreciate it!

 

[drevin]

Could be a HDD problem. Can you download HDTune (link below) and post a screenshot of the Health tab.

http://www.hdtune.com

 

[swiftrr]

Yeah so I can't even get the computer to run long enough to download any of the programs. I doubt it would last long enough to run them either. Any suggestions?

 

[drevin]

What do the temperature/voltage readings in BIOS show? Do the random crashes happen in BIOS also, or only after íts started loading the operating system?

 

[swiftrr]

The crashes only happen in the operating system (windows vista) and haven't occurred in bios yet. I'll check the temp readings as soon as I can

 

[JackNaylorPE]

I suspect temps or memory

1. Run memtest
http://memtest.org

2. Boot into BIOS, read temps

 

[swiftrr]

So I wasn't able to get memtest or find the temps, buy I did get to an hp hardware analyzer tool. I ran tests on my CPU and memory, and they all passed the test. But when I ran a test on my harddrive, the comp just shut off a couple mins into the test. I'm not sure if this a reliable program or not, but it looks like hard drive failure is the problem. Thoughts?

 

[someguynamedmatt]

I wouldn't say it isn't reliable, but it certainly isn't what I'd try first. If you could just find a way to download and run HDDTune, it would answer all your questions. It's a trial, but it has everything you could possibly need to tell you whether it's the hard drive or not.

 

[swiftrr]

Is it possible I could just test the hard drive by putting it in another computer? If it boots successfully and stays stable, then its not the hard drive? If the system did crash though, would it damage the test computer? Just a thought, let me know what you think . Thanks so much for your time!

 

[drevin]

Is it possible I could just test the hard drive by putting it in another computer? If it boots successfully and stays stable, then its not the hard drive? If the system did crash though, would it damage the test computer? Just a thought, let me know what you think . Thanks so much for your time!

Yes, that would be one way to test it. However, you can't boot into the problem computer's OS with the other computer - Windows doesn't support that. So you'd just want to add the problem drive alongside the test computer's own hard disk(s) and try to access/test it that way. Since it's not going to be the boot drive, the system might not crash even if the drive IS actually faulty, since it doesn't need to load any system files from there.

 

[swiftrr]

Ah okay sweet. Well I will try doing that and I'll let yet you know how it goes.