Dying hard disk?

[mrpringle]

Hi,
The other day (for no apparent reason) vista took ages to boot and the hard drive would seem to lock up randomly for about 60 seconds. During that time the Vista GUI was non responsive, but after that period the computer would return to normal like there was no interruption. Since gentoo is on the same hard drive and was working perfectly I decided it must be a problem with vista so I tried reinstalling, but during the install I had a similar problem.
When copying the files across in the vista setup, it took ages because the hard drive would stall regularly for these ~60 second periods where the HDD light would go off completely, then after this period the light would come on and the CD-ROM would start spinning, only to be stopped a few seconds later by another pause.

After a few installation attempts everything came good and vista installed without a prob. Then after a few more reboots and software installations the same problem started happening again, but went away again after several more reboots.

I ran the Western digital quick drive test and the full media test, which both passed. Otherwise I would have been sure the hard drive is on its way out.

Should I go out and buy another hard disk, the current one is about 1.5 years old.

 

[EchoTheDolphin]

Did the disk make any fast, steady clicking noises while it was seemingly locked up?

If not, did you check and make sure all internal connections were solid and not the least bit loose?

I had these two problems earlier this year on a seagate drive. It still seems to work, but I can't reliably run software or OS's on it (it's a media drive now)

 

[mrpringle]

Did the disk make any fast, steady clicking noises while it was seemingly locked up?

If not, did you check and make sure all internal connections were solid and not the least bit loose?

I had these two problems earlier this year on a seagate drive. It still seems to work, but I can't reliably run software or OS's on it (it's a media drive now)

I can't hear any unusual noises coming from the disk, and the temperature seems quite normal.

I might try another SATA cable just to be sure. Strange things seem to be happening on the vista partition of the drive. The PC reboots during the Prime95 stress test and/or fails with rounding errors when the PC isn't overclocked, but under the linux partition prime95 has been running for 24 hours so far without any errors or warnings.