Hard Disk Failure???

oasis13

Hi,
today when i booted up i got a message in the post screen: "Primary Slave Hard Disk Failure". This is a month old 250gb maxtor hard drive. I pressed F1 to continue and once in windows the harddrive was working fine! All my data was still on it and i could write to it! Whats the problem here? Is this harddrive about to die?

One thing i have noticed is that it is a very noisy harddrive - noisier than my 80gb western digital and much noiser than my silent 3 year old 40gb maxtor.

Cheers for the help

Little_John

Back your stuff up and see how you go, Maxtor drives are noisy but if it is a mechanical noise then return the drive to where you bought it

irnbru_2

Little_John wrote:

Back your stuff up and see how you go, Maxtor drives are noisy but if it is a mechanical noise then return the drive to where you bought it

And once backed up, download PowerMax and arm yourself with a fitness-test report.

skiddy2k

try chkdsk /f... just incase there's a error on your HD. more info here: http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/chkdsk.mspx?mfr=true

you may want to check in BIOS that you HD is not running at maximum speed... causes more noise and higher chance of HD failure... leave it as factory preset (default) (if you find the setting.. all BIOSs dont have the feature).. makes less noise and reduces chance of HD failure.
if your not sure, dont bother.. may mess something up

oasis13

Thanks for all your help

I think i may have fixed it... The BIOS was recognising the drive as "Maxtor Falcon" when it is not that. I disable the auto detection and then enabled it again and it detected it correctly and the problem vanished...

Its still loud though