Imminent Hard Drive Failure! or something else...
For the past four days my PC has been behaving very strange. The Application in use will stop responding and about four seconds later the mouse stops working and the system just locks up, this happens with any application, word, excel, internet, games, anything. The only way to get the computer working again is a reset. On the restart sometimes it can't find my IDE devices and needs to be reset, I've gone into set up and all of the hard drives are there. I even do an auto detect to ensure it's not just resident info. Well, after the eigth crash yesterday I had a warning from DOS telling me that a hard drive failure is imminent and to do all the back ups etc.
About 10 months ago I had some form of virus from an email that basically stuffed my e-mail so I thought upgrading my OS through MS update would help over come the problem and that basically destroyed my system to the point where it wouldn't load windows. So I reformatted my hard drives and started from scratch.
I have been very weary about any e-mail that I receive so I don't think it is a virus but I can't rule that out. I did a thorough virus check and it found a trojan buried in _restore that it couldn't do anything about, could this be the cause?
I use PC-cillin for fire wall and virus checking, spy bot and ad aware to keep the spyware out.
I have not heard any strange noises from the case.
My questions are:
Do you believe the DOS message?
Could it be a virus?
Is three years a good life span for a hard drive?
The last time I reformatted (replaced the hard drive) I couldn't archive my e-mails, they all came up with errors when I tried to put them back on, is there another method outside of out look express where I can send my emails and address book to pick up later, or some other idea?
Any suggestions as I really don't want to have to install the whole computer again?
System:
I built it about three years ago,
Motherboard LV7TA (I think, can find out when I get home if it is needed)
AMD 2100
512 Mb (PC2700)
20 Gb C: drive (about four years old, and is the one about to fail)
4 Gb D: drive (about six years old)
Windows ME
if you want any more info please feel free to ask.
Last edited by Cool_Hand; 5th July 2004 at 11:44.