Harddrive dying...?

The_Other_One

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I've got a western digital drive in my video computer. It's been a decent drive for the most part, but now i'm afriad it's dying. A few times recently, it would spin down for no reason. The computer has had heat problems, and I thought that might of been it, but this time, it had just been cut on.

The comp is a PIII 733, and Abit BE7-II(or something like that). The main drive is an IBM 25G, and the video is a WD 80G, ATA100...

Could the motherboard be failing? The last time it messed up, I got errors that both the CD Burner and the harddrive were disconnected improporly(both on the same channel...)

Just so noone tries, it's not software related because I have something installed on the boot drive so the computer always reverts back to how it was before being cut on(IE, anything installed or changed will go back to how it was prior to installing that program)
 
Go to the control panel/ click performance & maint./power options/ check at the top box & make shure it aint set to (presentation)

if your comp. is a desktop, set it to desktop.
if it's a laptop, set it to laptop...and so on.
 
Yes, as a matter of fact it would....Don't you know anything bout these settings...?/

if you tell it to whine down the hhd to save power it wil do so.....And watch your tone of voice....

Your not gunna get much help w/that additude
 
I get irritated fairly easilly when people give me simplistic answers I know arn't the case. I know what the setting do and they do NOT cause the computer to "disconnect" the harddrive and CD-ROM as it said I did.

But, to clear things up, I just checked those settings which were left as defaults. Monitor after 20 minutes, everything else to never.
 
Two possiblities:

1). You have changed a registry key that changed a command for the HD to spin down to conserve energy, or (in a strange case) spin down to prevent data corruption.

2). The excessive heat has fried the data chipset on the HD that relays directives from your CPU to the velocity engine to speed up (data read) or slow down (data write) Most likely *if this is the problem* the CPUs message of READ is tranferred and corrupted, so the HD is doing its default execuation of unknown data, in otherwords, its velocity is being set to WRITE mode.

Solution to #1, check all BIOS settings for startup and Windows settings for drives.

Solution to #2, A new HD is the only real solution for this problem, but you may want to check to make sure this is the problem first by closely monitoring you total free space on the HD (monitor it very closely!!!) If you see it change everytime that happens by even 500bytes, then Problem #2 may be the problem.

Sorry about your bad luck Other. :( :( GL fixing it. :)
 
#1 is out because the registry can't be changed on this comp. I have that program, Deep Freeze installed that keeps things from being changed on it.

The computer does get very hot, but it's usally not run for too long, just being a video computer. I have it running idle now and it's fine. I tried some videos on it, and they ran fine. I'll let it run for a bit and see if it messes up again.

I did check the bios settings earlier. The channel it was on was auto, so it's set to manual with the correct settings. It seems to be good sicne I did that, but we'll see...

Hopefully it's the motherboard or something(which is why I was asking) but I guess I can get a new drive if I must... As for space, I will watch it better. I just get an estimate on it. DV Video files are so big, I have to judge things in gigs ;P
 
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