hdd/mobo problem?

[ax0]

i had gentoo on it and i formatted it the other day to put xp on it. once i booted it up it was okay except for mouse problems. i rebooted and it froze up at the windows xp boot screen where the slider moves across. then i restarted it and it said there was no disk, start again freeze on the screen again.

etc.

i got a new cd and redid it and it seems to have worked (so far, i haven't rebooted yet) but the hard drive was making clicking noises each time i rebooted so i think it may be going dead ;/

[Beastie]

Yes, it's most probably the head mechanism trying and retrying the same operation and failing.

Why don't you try reading your HDD's S.M.A.R.T. attributes with Active@ Hard Disk Monitor or SpeedFan ?

Also do a surface scan and don't forget to backup any important data.

[jggimi]

If the drive stops working, your Windows OS won't run, so it won't be able to run any SMART analysis.

(For BSD/Linux/Cygwin ... I like smartmontools for SMART reporting and analysis)

[Carpetsmoker]

SMART status is far from foolproof.

Test your disk with an utility such as MHDD.

Running memtest also can't hurt ...

The Ultimate BootCD contains both of these programs (And many more).

[jggimi]

Originally Posted by Carpetsmoker

SMART status is far from foolproof.

I'll agree, in so far as a vendor normalized value is reported, and how that is converted into a "general health" summary by the electronics. But the raw values do not lie, and, of course, SMART is the only way to determine what the electronics on the disk drive knows about problems it has experienced.

I find the pinned sector counts and the detailed error logs extremely helpful. The offline tests, especially the long test, catch media trouble, including trouble with unallocated sectors. In RAID sets I can fail a drive with media trouble, clear the media problem (I use sysutils/e2fsprogs' "badblocks" tool for that), then reinsert the drive in the RAID set. The error logs, in particular, are good for root cause analysis; they can show you if an i/o failure is due to electronics, bus, media, or mechanicals.

[ax0]

im thinking it may be both.

the sata drive is pretty old, maybe 8 years. the mobo i took out to replace the cpu fan recently im thinking i might have damaged it because of how the mouse is acting as well when it works fine in any other machine.

[ax0]

Are there any iso's available (or tools on the ultimate boot cd) to check the mobo to see if it's faulty?

[jggimi]

Not a motherboard specific test, no. There are tools that will report temperatures from sensors on the board, and fan speeds.

Better would be stress testing. In the case of Windows, a great stress tester that produces lots of heat, is "prime95" -- the tool is used in a massive distributed computing project, but it just happens to have a "torture test" that works very well for testing PC hardware. It finds ... or rather, induces ... failures that pure memory testers can't find, as they don't stress the processor(s). And it is heat management where PCs often have problems. Tools like this produce incredible heat stress -- even greater than CPU-heavy applications like video encoding.

[ephemera]

> the hard drive was making clicking noises each time i rebooted

Is that a single click or a (random) series of clicks? Does it only make the clicking noise at bootup?
I had a new seagate disk that started making a clicking sound...it died in a few days.

I would recommend taking a complete disk backup right away.

While prime95 is great for stress testing the hardware, it may expedite the failure of any marginal components - something to keep in mind.

[geekswordsman]

While you've got the case open, take a good look over the capacitors. A common problem with motherboards, especially when heat has been an issue, is that one (or many) capacitors go bad, especially near the CPU.

All the cap's should be nice and flat on the top, no bulging and no corrosion/gunk built up. If any of them don't look perfectly flat, you have a bad/going bad cap.

Good news? You can replace a capacitor.
Bad news? Hope you soldering skills are up to par

Of course, looking for burn marks is also a good idea.

As for the hdd... Beastie has pretty much called it - clicking noises are a drive having a physical problem, typically a read/write head that is getting stuck. Backup (if you can) and replace ASAP.

[ax0]

i think its the mobo but im not sure and i can't check to see if its the hdd cause i have no other computers that have sata connectors.. at least i think this one doesn't... :/ and idk if i can do anything with my laptop? oh well. i think its mobo cause sometimes windows will boot up and sometimes it doesn't and i took the mobo completely out and i was kind of rough with it when i was replacing the chipset fan.

[Beastie]

Originally Posted by ax0

i think its the mobo but im not sure and i can't check to see if its the hdd cause i have no other computers that have sata connectors..

You could try it on any computer using a SATA-USB enclosure. You may get really cheap ones for 10-20 USD.