is this characteristic of a bad hard drive?

[ares350]

after about 5-10min of casual use, PC speed(including internet) slows. might go in and out. finally the mouse turns into an hour glass and though you can move the windows around, nothing loads, nothing opens, and the cursor stalls than moves, stalls, moves.

when you hit restart bios doesnt detect the HD, turn it off and turn it back on, it detects it, but repeats the old process.

finally the windows boot file came up corrupted. recovered to get the same problems.

formated and it had errors copying setup files.(every file from 8% on)

restarted, it copied this time. but it did the hour glass and stall thing during the second half of install right after I entered name, organization, and cd key.

is this HD, or something else? the slowing down of the system is whats throwing me, but all these corrupted files and bios losing the HD is whats making me think its the HDD.

[schismspeak]

Check all your drives connections if you havent already, but other than that I think it is the HD, also you might try disconnecting your cd-rom from the pc and see if it happens, a bad cd drive can cause similar problems.

[ares350]

checked the connections, no good.

the cd drive is brand new, I just used it for the first time to back a few things up after this started happening.

Ill try disconnecting it though. cant hurt to try. thanks for the advice.

[EclipseJP]

Is the drive turning on and off? Do you hear any clicking or weird noises comming from the drive? Also are you using ribbon cables or round cables. I had really bad problems with my WD drives using rounded cables. I would get bad sectors all of the time, and would have to do a rebuild on it at least once a week. I really wanted to take the drives back. I just went back to the ones that came with it and worked like a charm.

[Dukeman]

See if you can boot up and try to run WD Drive Diagnostics (http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp). See if you can run this tool on the drive when you're in Windows. If not, try their DOS tool, but let the drive warm up first so that the tool will be testing it about the time you usally see the failure.

[ares350]

Ill try that diagonostic, I am using round cables that came with the dfi lanparty board.

a friend let me borrow a 4gig drive to test. so Im trying that now. if that works.... lol Ill probably go buy a maxtor before Ill give up my pretty glow cables. :p of course... a full format didnt help, is a full format different than rebuilding?

[ares350]

yup, 4.6gig running strong.

tomarrow Ill run the WD diagnostic, see what it says I guess. take it from there. my luck theres not any great HD deals right now.

never had a drive fail on me in my life. this one fails after less than a year.

[stan03]

actually if you check the sunday ads, iv seen some great deals on hdds, actually better than usuall. there were outrageous deals with some WD and seagate drives.

[MitchV]

never had a drive fail on me in my life. this one fails after less than a year.

The good news is that if the drive IS dead during the course of a year, you can send it back to WD and get another.

[Airbornederekc]

my maxtor 250 gig is dead and imma RMA it and ive only had it for like 3 months i suggest u do the same

[Airbornederekc]

oh and mitch i hope ur joking about that system in ur rig

[Cyrix_2k]

Ill try that diagonostic, I am using round cables that came with the dfi lanparty board.

a friend let me borrow a 4gig drive to test. so Im trying that now. if that works.... lol Ill probably go buy a maxtor before Ill give up my pretty glow cables. :p of course... a full format didnt help, is a full format different than rebuilding?
I've had three hard drives go up in my life, all maxtors... An 80mb, a 1.5gb, and a 20gb.

[ares350]

well I got a maxtor 250gb for 150$; cause it had 0 rebates, rather than 120 seagate with 50$ rebates.

now Im fighting to get windows to take the 250gb size.

Ill contact WD now to return the other HD.