Question:
I wrote a big long reply to a message posted by Joan which seems to have not
transmitted. It's probably hung up in my outbox at home, and will show up
later.
The gist of it, though, was a description of the death of my work hard
drive, first indicated by the absence of bookmarks in my bookmark folder.
What other signs of impending hard drive failures are there? (Other than,
of course, the various "blue screens of death".)
Answer:
well, uh... crunching sounds coming from the computer would be a clue... or
smoke coming from the vents... those are good clues... :) sometimes an
I/O error will occur. there's a neat little freebie at
http://www.hdtune.com/ that lets you test the reliability of your
computer. i can't guarantee that it's perfect, but i run it on occasion.
I do hope you had a backup of work files...
When my laptop hard drive died last fall one of the symptoms was slowness.
Also System Restore wouldn't work. A few crashes which are usually rare.
The other experience I had was with a slave drive I had added to my first
computer, I had a lot of data on it in three partitions. I wasn't using it
regularly at the time but would occasionally log on for some reason. I was
using it because the newer one was down. First clue was that I couldn't
access stuff one of the partitions and couldn't do a scan disk on it.
What you speak of in your message is typical of software corruption, not
hardware failure. Typically speaking, hard disk drives die pretty much
all at once. i.e., you turn on the PC and it does not boot. It happens,
but is rare, that HDD's warn you of failure before there is time to
recover. If, in the past, the drive has been very quiet but one day
starts making noises it is a sign that doom is eminent. (Do not confuse
fan noise with HDD noise.) Losing bookmarks is typical of software
corruption.
