T23 - Hard drive clunking and now dead - did I cause it??

[g8tzl]

I recently installed a 40GB hard drive in my T23. After a few days, on booting up, there was a terrible clunking noise. I powered down and booted again - this time I got "No operating system".

The HDD has obviously failed - I think- although the T23 had not been dropped etc!! I tried installing the HDD in a USB caddy but it seems completely dead - not a disaster data wise, but most of my other HDD's are much lower capacity

I've always assumed that HDD's fail because of mechanical problems - its just one of those things. It was a 2nd hand drive and for all I know, might have been powered up for 5 years non-stop!! However, the drive failed the day after I was attempting to update XP SP2 and Ad-aware. I initially installed Ad-aware and there was a problem so I removed it. I then decided to update XP SP2 but the Windows Update would not work - I got an 0x8DDD0004 error - which was something to do with an XP SP2 bug, I think. The fix involved various registry tweaking of .DLL's which I decided to do the "next day" - but when I booted up the next day , the HDD failed big time!!

Is it just a coincidence that the HDD failed?? Or can some DLL corruption /virus etc kill a HDD?? Also, what does the clunking noise actually indicate - is it failed bearings ?

Thanks

[jronald]

The clunk did it
I have a couple that sound like they are flying all to pieces.
In my very short experience with them, the louder they are the sooner they fail

I have noticed that they tend to make similar noise by brand before they go
I ran Maxtor for many years and it was always a repetitive swish, clunk, swish, clunk
When they started that I would freeze them, get the data off and test them, only to find the diag utils would not recommend keeping them.
The only refurbs I trust are Seagates, everything else I by new.
Geeks.Com has by far the best price on the Seagate, although eBay also has some very good prices

Ron