Is my computer dying slowly?

corblimey

Odd thing started happening to my machine this evening (HP AMD Phenom Quad-Core 2.2 GHz, 3GB RAM, Vista SP2). At about 7pm, I came back to my machine to find a bunch of "N: drive is not available, do you want to format this drive?" type messages. N: is my backup drive, and has been working fine for about a year. So I closed all the messages, and tried to access N: and my mirror backup, J:. Both were unavailable. So I decided to restart my machine.

Uh-oh. It wouldn't come back. Windows Repair kicked in (I wasn't sure about the Windows Restore, so I said no to it) and after a couple of hours (last notice from Repair was that it was fixing hard disk problems) I was finally back in.

N: and J: were still unavailable, they're on a hub, and when I checked my devices, the hub was showing a problem, code 10, couldn't load the driver. So I plugged out the hub and plugged it back in. And hey presto, everything came back as before

But now I'm worried, should I be taking this as a signal of something going wrong in the future and start moving everything I don't back up regularly on to my backup drives for the inevitable?

Anything I can do? Anything I can look for? Any ideas as to why my N: drive would suddenly become unavailable causing Windows to want to format it?

Overheal

Thats a strange one. In practice though, I try not to use the USB Drives in a state of constant connection. Its just always felt finnicky to me. Instead I plug them when I need them. If you're looking to run External drives over extended periods of time consider using an eSATA interface instead, and take USB out of the equation. An example would be to transfer your external drives into new enclosures/cases with an eSATA port on them, to connect to an eSATA connector on the back of the PC: if none exists, an eSATA card can be got for next to nothing.

corblimey

Tks for the reply, Overheal. When I got up this morning, J: had failed in the same way as N: yesterday. I swapped the port on the hub and it came back immediately, so I suspect the problem lies with the hub itself. I'm going to pick up a new one this week and see if it keeps things going a little longer.

eSATA is a good idea, and when these 2 drives are nearing capacity, I'll make sure my next 2 external h/d's have this capability, but I can't seem to find an interface card, on komplett anyway. Any cards mentioning eSATA are main motherboards, and I wouldn't have thought I'd need to go to that length to get an eSATA interface?

Overheal

Shouldn't. I have a PCI-based eSATA interface card lying around a drawer somewhere.

tony melia

my computer keeps making noise like a clock winding or ticking .Is there any way to stop this .....It,s compaq desktop
thanks
ANTO

Deano12345

tony melia wrote: »

my computer keeps making noise like a clock winding or ticking .Is there any way to stop this .....It,s compaq desktop
thanks
ANTO

Either a fan is on its way out or its your Hard Drive telling you its about to die

ricman

Small clicking noise usually means the hardrive is nearly dead, leave the pc on, backup your photos,mp3s, to an external drive if you have one,you can even buy an 8gig drive around 20euro,or a 300gig drive for 60euro.