T23 - suspect failing hard drive?

[HDRW]

I've been having trouble with both my T23s recently - I'll start a separate thread for the other one later. The one I'm using now periodically exhibits the following behaviour:

It stops responding to *most* mouse-clicks and keyboard input, in particular those trying to switch programs, or apparently anything that needs disk access.
A short "Blip" sound is given off now and then - shorter than the standard beep, as if it's been chopped off. Repeats every so often, maybe 45 seconds, but I haven't timed it, and I couldn't swear it's regular.
The HDD light (leftmost of the lights above the keyboard) stays on solidly.

It won't respond to <Ctrl><Alt><Del> - the only way to get things going again is to power-cycle it by holding down the power button. It powers up OK and will run fine until the next instance of this problem.

On one occasion (only, out of dozens) there was a repeated "clunk-whirr-clunk" sound from the disk drive until I powered it down.

Because of the latter and the HDD light, I suspect my hard drive is failing (it's a 30GB Travelstar, vintage Dec '01) but I'd like others' opinions. This doesn't happen to a regular timetable, but it feels like it's getting more common, and now happens about once a day.

Oh, and I *am* doing regular backups!

Cheers,

Howard

[ronbo613]

In my experience, when you have random problems and funny noises and no reason to suspect any of your other hardware, it's probably the hard drive. If your drive is six years old, that is definitely in the "old age" category. With regular daily use, I find hard drives last 3-4 years on average, mas o menos.
Backing up your data is a good idea in the situation you've described.

[BillD]

clunk-whirr-clunk" sound from the disk drive until I powered it down.

It's not good when you hear any sounds from the HDD. Especially 'clunk'...

Sounds like it's on it's way out. Ebay has thousands of HDD.

[wogeboy]

Suspect a bad drive...run the hard drive diagnostics to be certain.
(providing you can boot from floppy) or you could boot off CD

http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm

[furiousmonkey]

Sounds bad, really bad, in my experience when the harddrive starts a clunkin' its a time to go a shoppin'!

Seriously though, this is a great oportunity to go to ebay and pick up a 7200 RPM drive, a performance boost over what you may have been used to, especially if there were bad sectors, causing reduced speed.

Its actually a good thing.

[jkahng]

it could be a harddrive problem. but it could also be a problem related to motherboard.

if a ctrl,alt,del freezes up, it could be mb, cpu related.

swap the harddrive to a known working unit, this should be the easiest way to find out if indeed the hdd is the problem.


fyi, i've had freezing problems solved by pressing hard on certain portions of my compaq presario=> ended up as bad cpu/heatsink mounts

hope this helped