how to tell if your hardrive on your computer is dying?

Question

today i turned on my computer and it ran really slow it took 5 mins to load and took a really long time to get anywhere can anyone tell me what is wrong with my computer

Answer 1

The symptoms you describe could be caused by lots of different issues: everything from viruses to overheating and anything in between.

Or it could be a dying hard drive. To answer the question, you can get a program to look at some statistics your hard drive keeps. There are many programs that can do this, but I like a program called SpeedFan. It's linked in my sources. It has many other purposes in life (controlling fan speeds for some computers and such), but it will do what we need. Once downloaded and installed, go to the SMART tab, choose your hard drive from the "Hard disk" dropdown, and look for attributes that are dropping. Especially, look at anything that says "Error Rate" or "Reallocated Sector Count." The way the numbers work is that they start out as high as they can go and drop as problems are recorded. Some start from 100, some 200, some 255, and so on. It's impossible for me to know for your hard drive, but it should be very evident what they started out as and which ones are dropping (you can look at the "Raw" heading too - they should be zero if there's never been an error, but some aren't zero for a good reason - don't get too panicked). If more than one of those is dropping off or even one of them has dropped very far (look at the "worst" heading for this), then it's probably time to replace your drive.

Or you could go the more low-tech way and just listen to it. Get your ear about half a foot to a foot away from the computer. If it seems to sound like it's grinding or has a high pitched whine you've never heard out of it before it might have issues. If you hear loud sounds like someone tapping/clicking metal against metal you should probably be worried.

Generally speaking hard drives last 3 to 5 years. If yours is beyond this then there's not much harm in replacing it anyways. They're cheap nowadays and you'll probably end up with a bigger, faster one just because even the cheapest ones are bigger and faster.

Answer 2

Delete Temporary Internet Files, and Recycle Bin. (WinXP: Start>Control Panel>Performance and>Maintenance>Free Up Harddisk Space), then run a registry cleaner,(CCleaner for free), and last defrag,(WinXP:Start>Control Panel>Perform. and Maint.>Rearrange items on your harddrive to make programs run faster)

Answer 3

It gives bad sector errors. You may be having a virus or spyware installed on your PC. Norton, AVG , Avast are free antivirus software. Ad-aware, Ewido are free spyware removers. You can download free softwares at http://fixit.in/antivirus.html and http://fixit.in/spywareremover.html

Answer 4

u mite have loads of large files on ur computer? u can always try disk clean up to get rids of sum and get rid of ne file su dont need?

Answer 5

If its running slow i suggest you get more RAM or uninstall useless programs and kill all useless processes. If your hard drive is dying it will make weird sounds and clicks..

Answer 6

Hi. You could try 'WindowsCare' to fix malware and try again. http://www.iobit.com/advancedwindowscareper.html In any event a new, higher capacity, drive may be in order.

Answer 7

try a window washer & a registry cleaner & error cleaner thats whats helps mine

Answer 8

use scandisk, if your getting bad sectors or bad clusters, look out it's DIEING