Is my harddisk failing??

[Capitalistdoginchina]

Over the last 2 or 3 weeks i have had problems shuting down and rebooting. I performed a virus scan (No problem) and a "Scandisk". The scandisk found some bad clusters but said it fixed them all. I also performed a disk defrag as well.

Here is the symptom: When i try to shut down in the normal manner the system "Restarts". When i try to "Restart" it shuts down. :confused: Boot up time is lomger than usual and it sems to pause during the boot up...after the pause it shuts down. Sometimes during the restart i get a blue screen with the message " Windows protection error, System Halted".

Then when i power off (Using the power switch)and turn it back on it tries to start in safe mode, but if i select normal start mode it starts fine.

This happens just about everytime, once it starts it runs fine all day. I am running Windows ME and i did a reinstal of Win ME. But no difference.

Is my hard disk about to fail? Will reformatting my C Drive fix the problem with a clean install of Windows ME?

I suspect it is time to buy a new harddisk. This computer is 3 years old (AMD athlon 900Mhz).

CDIC

[PiggDogg]

Cap,

At about 3 years of age, my old P2-400's (built in Feb 1999) hard drive began having troubles and died about two months later. Fortunately, I replaced that drive about a week before it took the final plunge. I'm glad that I took care of the problem before I lost any data.

Considering todays inexpensive prices for hard drives of maybe $60 for a 40 gig or $100 for an 80 gig at local & online venders (Compu USA, Best Buy, etc.; online: New Egg, FTI Computers, TWCO, etc.), it is most prudent to just buy a new hard drive and use the old one as some sort of backup for data.

Just an opinion.

Cheers, Richard

[Schrullenhaft]

Usually the issue with strange shutdowns and restarts may be a device other than your hard drive. Reinstalling over your current installation most likely won't fix your problem.

If you have a brand name hard drive, some of the manufacturers have their own disk diagnostics (which requires that you boot your computer with the diskette). You can download the diagnostics (which will create a bootable diskette for you) from the manufacturer's website. In fact you're often required to run the diagnostics before you can return a drive for warranty service.

The most common option in the diagnostics is a full read of the hard drive (non-destructive). There are also 'destructive' tests that will test writing to your entire hard drive (and will, of course, delete all of your data on that drive). These test should indicate whether the drive itself is to blame or not. I'm not sure if they'll indicate or isolate any problems with the IDE controller (the Southbridge chip on many motherboards).

The SMART functionality you may have seen in the CMOS/BIOS setup is geared towards warning users of impending failure of their hard drives. It runs some sort of minimal diagnostic on boot and if the drive doesn't pass, then it warns you. I've never used the feature myself and it's a bit dubious as to whether it is completely accurate or useful (i.e. - you may have serious problems before the warning or you may never have problems despite getting the warnings).

When you turn off the computer with the power switch and Windows attempts to boot in Safe Mode, that's intentional. The assumption is that your system was shutdown improperly (this usually causes a Scandisk to come up when you boot) or that Windows had a problem starting up and enabling all devices (hence Safe Mode which minimizes the number of devices initialized).

If you're desparate to solve this problem, then I'd recommend:

1) Backing up whatever files you want to keep (your original data, email, etc.) to another drive or media.

2) Running both the read and write tests from the manufacturer's diagnostic diskette. Before doing this you may want to create a boot diskette in Windows ME and find out where all of your device drivers are (CD's, downloads, etc.).

3) If the tests pass, then make sure that your motherboard BIOS is updated (make note of your settings before updating, so you can restore most of them after the update) and proceed with reinstalling Windows ME.

4) Hopefully this will solve your reboot/shutdown problem. If it doesn't, then more troubleshooting may be required (turning off motherboard devices or removing PCI cards, etc.).

[brooktrout]

Capitalistdoginchina,

I wouldn't think that this is HD related. It sounds like a device driver problem or the inability of ME to force a shutdown on a particular program. Have you installed/updated anything lately?

Try running thru this link and see if anything looks related to your setup:

http://www.aumha.org/a/shtdwnme.htm

[Capitalistdoginchina]

Thanks for the info guys.

Ok, well i tried the website link and it has a few good tips, so i downloaded the shutdown patch ....but it did not work. Then i remembered that i had installed a new USB mouse, so i uninstalled it and replaced it with a standard mouse. No difference.

Hhmm, ok so i try a few other tips mentioned on the website but that also failed.

I then decide to format C and start all over, but after starting formatting it finds some bad clusters within a few seconds and tries to repair it (Can't remember the onscreen message exactly) then it hangs. So i reboot and try again. Each time it hangs during the formatting! Seems like i can't win I have never had that happen before.

Looks like i will just but a new hard disk, this one was 20gig ! Oh well.

Thanks for the tips guys.

CDIC

PS. I could not find a diagnostic disk, the drive is an IBM disk (OEM), i visisted their website but could not find the utility.

[Schrullenhaft]

IBM calls their hard disk diagnostics Drive Fitness Test. Hopefully this may find your problem or give you the opportunity to return the drive for repair.

[Capitalistdoginchina]

Thanks for the link, i downloaded the Drive Fitness Test and it is a great utility! It fixed all the problems on the disk although i still have my shut down problem.

The utility also has its own program for formating the disk, so if i want to try again it should be ok. Maybe next weeks project will be format the drive.

CDIC