Hard drive failure, how to tell.

[TsukikoTech]

Don't you just love computers? Ok, so I heard that your hard drive can go bad after a couple of years and I think that's what might be happening. I've had my trusty del inspiron 2200 for around five years now and it's been pretty reliable. It was working fine this morning until I started burning some audio discs. Using Itunes, I burned a few discs and when got to maybe,like the third disc I started having these burn errors. I updated Itunes and was able to burn a couple more then it started saying no burner or software found. After a while my computer kept locking up and there was no sound coming from it, like every stopped. I ran a checkdisk through the cmd and it said there were errors and after running the checkdisk diagnostics my computer wouldn't display the desktop. The screen remains black and the cursor is movable but nothing happens. Is there a way to figure out what's wrong with it and how should I fix it?

 

[johnb35]

What happens when you reboot? Can you boot to a cd? If you can, download the hard drive manufactures disk diagnostic utility to scan the drive for errors.

 

[The_Other_One]

Your hard drive can and will go bad when it darn well pleases I've had drives fail within a few weeks, I've had drives fail after 20 years. Usually when a drive begins to fail, you start to get errors, degraded performance and sometimes systems lockups. Sometimes the drive will no longer be detected, sometimes it can't be read. Sometimes it'll make all kinds of racket, sometimes it makes no new noises. It really all depends on how the drive's failing (if that's even the case).

If I were you, I'd run some programs such as chkdsk while booting off some other drive (windows setup disk, LiveCD, BartPE, etc...) or sticking the drive in another computer. If you can, Windows Scandisk can sometimes find problems with the drive... The problem could very well be something else software related.

With the age of the computer, it very well could be the drive, but don't put your money on it just yet.

 

[TsukikoTech]

Well now when I try to reboot it still goes black but a window pops up saying windows is starting up but it does nothing and I don't hear any sound from the hard drive. I tried booting from a disc but nothing happens. It's like it doesn't want to read the disc drive. I had the same problem when I reformatted the computer a while ago, even after going through the bios and changing the settings.

 

[TsukikoTech]

If I were you, I'd run some programs such as chkdsk while booting off some other drive (windows setup disk, LiveCD, BartPE, etc...) or sticking the drive in another computer. If you can, Windows Scandisk can sometimes find problems with the drive... The problem could very well be something else software related.

Thing is I tried booting from the disc but it won't work. A while back I had the same problem when trying to reformat the hard drive. I had gone through the BIOS and changed the settings so that it would start from the D drive but to no avail. After several attempts it had worked and I had gotten it allupand running perfectly. How could I test the drive with another computer? Will a laptop Hard disk work on a home PC? (Which is rather screwed up, thanks to my parents.)