Hard Drive problems

[The master]

On sunday morning I turned my computer on and everything was working fine, I went out and played golf about 7 hours later I went to use the computer again, but it was a different story. I turned the computer on and it got to the "Welcome to windows xp" page on the start up and froze, I then noticed a strange almost hissing noise comming from the base unit. I wasn't sure what was happening so I manually shut the computer down and tired again, but the exact same thing happended. After several goes it kept freezing on the same page. So I examined it further by taking of the side of the computer and discovered that this noise was comming from the hard drive, which is what I had gathered.

I am currently using the family comupter and my 2 year old dell is sitting in my room doing nothing, is there anyway this can be fixed, or am I going to have to buy a new hard drive. Will all my stuff be lost of the other computer or can it be retrieved.

Thanks in advance for any help.

[LeftyHoges]

Not the greatest techie around but I believe a good computer technician will be able to save 90% of whats on your hard drive. The hissing may be coming from a bad sector on the drive when trying to boot. A good 250gb hard drive should only cost you about 60 pound. (Well they're worth about $150 AUS so thats my conversion ). And they're not hard to install. Other option is to take the computer to a place that does free diagnostics of your computer. They'll soon sort you out.

[Pa Jayhawk]

Hissing???

You notice any clicking noises recently? A sure sign your hard drive is about to go.

Usually when the Harddrive goes you will get a message that it cannot find the operating system

[Eracer]

Originally Posted by The master

On sunday morning I turned my computer on and everything was working fine, I went out and played golf about 7 hours later I went to use the computer again, but it was a different story. I turned the computer on and it got to the "Welcome to windows xp" page on the start up and froze, I then noticed a strange almost hissing noise comming from the base unit. I wasn't sure what was happening so I manually shut the computer down and tired again, but the exact same thing happended. After several goes it kept freezing on the same page. So I examined it further by taking of the side of the computer and discovered that this noise was comming from the hard drive, which is what I had gathered.

I am currently using the family comupter and my 2 year old dell is sitting in my room doing nothing, is there anyway this can be fixed, or am I going to have to buy a new hard drive. Will all my stuff be lost of the other computer or can it be retrieved.

Thanks in advance for any help.

You DO have a backup of all your important data, right?

[ThatCanadianGuy]

Originally Posted by Eracer

You DO have a backup of all your important data, right?

Eracer, Isn't the guy in your sig suppose to beat himself into a pile of mush?.

I'd make sure something didn't wiggle loose, but I have no idea when it comes to the technical fixingness side of comps.

[LeftyHoges]

Originally Posted by ThatCanadianGuy

Eracer, Isn't the guy in your sig suppose to beat himself into a pile of mush?.

Looks like its been cut short. If you watch closely a little bit of red pops up on the keyboard, and thats where it starts....

Curious, how do you cut short a .gif file? (I'm assuming its a .gif)

[Clugnut]

I don't want to be the bearer of bad news, but my Dell did something similar about a year ago. It was the hard drive. They couldn't save anything from mine. That sucked. Take it out and stick it in the freezer for an hour. That can get them to work long enough to back it up.

[wirehair]

Hissing huh? Could be one of the read/write heads dragging on a platter as it spins. No good can come of that.

[Eracer]

Originally Posted by LeftyHoges

Looks like its been cut short. If you watch closely a little bit of red pops up on the keyboard, and thats where it starts....

Curious, how do you cut short a .gif file? (I'm assuming its a .gif)

I tried a few shareware gif animation programs, and none of them worked the way I wanted them to. So I bought a $49 program called "Gif Animator" from Longtion Software