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Dead Hard Disk?


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#1
MatCon5

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Hello all, I need help figuring out if this HDD is dead or not.
It's a WD3200AAKS, 320GB and was about 40% full at the time.
I was playing TF2, took a break and opened Firefox and the screen went white. No response from keyboard or mouse.
Upon rebooting it would freeze at the Asus logo screen (where it says to press Del to enter setup) Tried entering setup and no go. After another reboot I think it was Asus's express gate startup screen or something (sorry not sure) There I saw the words SATA 3 ERROR.

So I disconnected SATA 3 on the mainboard and the computer boots into Windows now. If I leave it plugged in, even in a different SATA port or with a different cable, the PC boots now but the drive doesn't show up. So I removed the drive all together now.

Also now during startup I no longer see "Loading Expressgate" before I see the Asus logo etc. At one point in the reboots I did see an error for "Expressgate failed to load"

Not sure if this matters, but before this happened, earlier that day I messed with Ownership and Permissions for that drive under Windows 7, wouldn't let me alter text files or overwrite files without certain permissions I guess. So I changed Ownership to Admin, and permissions to full control.

I tried a different hard drive in SATA 3 port and the port seems to be working fine.

So is it safe to assume the drive died? I had some important data on it, but nothing too serious was lost.
And should I update anything? BIOS or redownload Expressgate?

Thanks in advance.

Edited by MatCon5, 13 March 2010 - 12:17 AM.

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#2
SRX660

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The easist method to see if the drive has gone bad is to stick the drive into another compatible computer and see if the drive can be seen and accessed. If it can the drive is not bad.

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#3
MatCon5

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I tried it in an older XP system and it seems to work fine.

I put it back in my Win7 system and it was working for a while, now under My Computer it's showing it, but when I open the drive to look at files the bar at the top slowly tries to fill with Green, but once at the end nothing happens.

This drive was used in an XP system before I started using it as a slave, I don't think I formatted it since I installed XP on it. So perhaps it needs to be formatted now after all this time?

It also seems to be making a strange noise. Every so many seconds it makes a strange "ziiiiiiiiip" sound. So then again... maybe it is dying....
After it stopped working in my Win7 machine I put it back into an older XP machine and the XP machine loops while booting.. so it seems the hard drive is the fault.

Any more advice would be greatly appreciated.

Edited by MatCon5, 14 March 2010 - 01:03 PM.

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#4
SRX660

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It sounds like the drive is dying. I, personally do not spend any time trying to fix dying HD's. They are cheaply( relatively) and easily replaced to keep messing with them. Bad sectors never fix themselves and reformatting and reinstalling usually just gets you a working system until more bad sectors develop.

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#5
MatCon5

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Thanks for the advice, the drives warranty doesn't expire until July 28. And WD has some really nice replacement options. I'll get right on replacing this one.

Thanks again :)
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#6
Spyderturbo007

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That's why I love WD drives. I've had some go bad, as you will with any manufacturer, but they always step up to the plate when it comes to warranty. I've never had a hassle getting a drive replaced.
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