Curse

Sabor_Wolf · Jan 20, 2007, 11:13 AM // 11:13

This is a weird one for me.. this has happened 3 times, once months before, and twice in just 2 days, and it JUST happened now, so I have officially rooted GW out of the equation as I was typing this, but Maybe you can help me still

My PC randomly locks up, mouse, sound, everything for 2 or so seconds, at the time of the lock up i hear a weird Squeak like sound.. if you ever played america's army before 2.7 and turned 3D sound on and your footsteps squeaked alot, thats what it sounds like, then after the squeak and 2 second lockup, you hear the hard drive click for a split second, and it works again, 3 seconds later it happens again, except these last 2 times (A few minutes ago, and just seconds ago in first paragraph here) it only did it once

I monitored the temperatures while its happened and they were all perfectly fine, No processes that shouldnt be running are running, altho this is a physical hardware problem it would seem, but I dunno what as I cannot tell where the sound is comming from, It sounds like the middle of the case, and I cant pinpoint it to the disk drives, hard drive, vid card, sound card, anything, anyone seen or heard of this problem before?

AMD Athlon 2800+ XP
1024 RAM
X850 Pro w/ 256 RAM
SB Live 5.1 Soundcard

*EDIT* I start up EVEREST, which shows all your devices, hardware temps, and etc, and i get the freezing once when i start it, So i figure... whenever my PC uses whatever it is that does this, it does it, so i started going through everything making the PC get the info on the devices i click on, and when i hit Media, it froze up bad, it was constant, was no unfreezing... i have an onboard soundcard, and the SB Live, but the onboard is disabled, i think it might have something to do with sound in someway...

*EDIT again*

i believe its my Hard drive so ill be fetching another one tonight or tomorrow, i never knew they made 750gig hard drives =O thats aLOT and alot of money, think ill opt for a 250gig or 160gig

MegaMouse · Jan 20, 2007, 07:22 PM // 19:22

First you may have answered your own question in that I think It is the hard drive failing (the clicking is a tell tale sign). As far as hard drive size goes, I would not recommend using a large one for your main boot drive. Best thins to do is get a smaller (40-60gigs max) to install Windows and your apps onto, and use the large one for storage of important stuff. The reason that I do not reccomend usiong the large one for your boot drive is this: Your boot drive is constantly working, accessing files and windows. The failure rate of a boot drive can be quite high depending upon the usage it gets. If you have a second hard drive installed and your boot drive fails then the only data that will be lost is that which was on the main drive. Also the second drive can be used to create a backup of the main drive so when failure does occur you will not have to hunt everything that is needed (install cd's) to get your computer back up.
One more thing that I recommend is using an external hard drive as a system backup. This way if for some reason your home or office catches fire or there is flood damage then if you have the external backup in a safe place getting your computer back up will be no problem.

Mega Mouse