hard drive failure imminent

[Mark_88]

That makes sense Allan...I've had drives appear healthy and tried to reinstall the OS because it became unstable only to have the fresh install collapse just as it was wrapping things up...swapping in a new drive fixed it...

I would have suggested swapping in another drive if I'd seen the screens...it sounded very much like a virus/malware problem because of the website redirects...exactly what the virus infected computers were doing...even giving HDD errors saying your data is at risk...but it was simply a very persistent bug...

And, yes, backup till you're blue (the colour of a full disk in Windows) is the best rule...something I do now after loosing my complete build photo section because of a newbie tech support person who swore the file I was telling them was giving me errors right after I'd installed their software was not part of their software...things went rapidly in the wrong direction trying to fix a problem...

[AllanD]

Originally Posted by Mark_88

That makes sense Allan...I've had drives appear healthy and tried to reinstall the OS because it became unstable only to have the fresh install collapse just as it was wrapping things up...swapping in a new drive fixed it...

I would have suggested swapping in another drive if I'd seen the screens...it sounded very much like a virus/malware problem because of the website redirects...exactly what the virus infected computers were doing...even giving HDD errors saying your data is at risk...but it was simply a very persistent bug...

And, yes, backup till you're blue (the colour of a full disk in Windows) is the best rule...something I do now after loosing my complete build photo section because of a newbie tech support person who swore the file I was telling them was giving me errors right after I'd installed their software was not part of their software...things went rapidly in the wrong direction trying to fix a problem...

Have you ever heard the phrase medical professionals use when discussing diagnosis: - When you hear hoof-beats, think "horses" not "Zebras". -

When a person has a sniffle and a sore throat, you assume a common cold,
Not Ebola or Pneumonic Plague. (Or some other "Unicorn" sub-species)

Hard drive failure is FAR and Away the likliest cause of all kinds of computer issues. the interesting thing is that errors can occour ANYWHERE on a hard drive platter and since data gets shuffled around and fragmented on the drive you never know when some bit of critical data or program or the operating system is going to be "written" to a part of the drive than subsequently cannot be read.

if you ALWAYS assume that the hard drive is the culprit you will be
wrong <5% of the time, and frankly most of the rest are the result
of STUPID PEOPLE whi *think*they know about computers starts
changing/deleting things they "dont need"until they hit something
they really DO need...

Many people less experienced will, in a knee jerk reaction, assume
they have a virus, and honestly? In the past 100 computers I've
worked on TWO were actually infected. BOTH were from the
same customer.

I have another on the way (the guy called yesterday) that has
the "Windows security" trojan (His daughter clicked on a popup)


On my C2Q Win7pro computer my OS is on a 120gb Partition on
a fast 500gb HDD, my E-mail program and 17 years of archived e-mail
is on a 3gb partition, the remainder of the drive is used for "temporary"
video files (Basically DVR storage).
I clone the entire drive every three weeks or so to another 500gb HDD

My Mail is backed up to a 2gb USB stick that is mounted to an internal
USB jack and there's a duplicate backup on an SD card.

I learned the hard way to not only protect my Data but to protect my OS installation and if there's a better way to do that than cloning the entire
system drive I haven't found it.



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[Mark_88]

Originally Posted by Jim Oaks

It's been a bad couple of days for my computer and I.

Some times it runs slow, or a program stops responding. When I do a google search, the first Link I click on never takes me to the right site. Its always a redirect.

Originally Posted by AllanD

Hard drive failure is FAR and Away the likliest cause of all kinds of computer issues.
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When I first read this thread...the highlighted area is what stood out...

This, in my experience, is not a HDD failure...it is a virus or malware...up to and including the sluggish performance...something has infected the computer...if it was true HDD failure the links would load...or maybe they wouldn't...but redirects...they say "virus or malware"...but without knowing where the redirects where is one of those "unknowns" that without being there can be misleading...

Sluggish performance and random popups that appear to be genuine system errors I've seen enough of...and they were always caused by the virus chewing away at the OS...or creating their own warnings that mislead...

Disk 4 errors on a system that has, at most, 2 disks is erroneous...and sounds more like some flakey viral warning...not an actual system error...if Jim is running RAID on a two disk system then disk 4 is not valid...unless there is something I missed in RAID configurations or Windows Vista has some wonky reporting program errors...

Now I'm curious to know what the actual problem is and I hope Jim updates this thread...

I've beaten my head against the wall sometimes trying to figure something out and have been wrong as often as I've been right...so although I like to think that my troubleshooting skills are valid...it's always a learning experience...

[dangerranger83]

Last time I had a problem occur like this, about 5 months ago I figured I had a virus on my laptop causing it. My computer was fine, left it for 30 min sitting on, came back to it and the hardrive would for no reaon max itself out on read/write and freeze everything for exactly 30 seconds before I could do anything and this occured every 10-30 min. And when I went to go start up my computer, it would take easily 10 min to start up vs the 1.5-2 min (that includes the typing of my password and all the other programs that start in the background) From there I tried many different virus removal programs and none could find anything. I figured it had to be a harddrive failure. Since my computer was in warrenty I could get it fixed. Called up my computer manufacture and told them about it and they said to do a system restore, since my computer has a recovery button on it that puts it all right back to factory specs with all the programs, etc.... Well after backing everything up, I pushed the button and an hour or so later the computer was back to the way I had got it on day one but since then all has been good. Turns out it was a software failure going on and my computer had done a fresh instal of win7 to itself (gotta love Lenovo for putting that fature on my computer). My only thing that took the longest was getting programs that I had downloaded back on it and other misc. things.

Anyway that you can get us a video or pictures of all of this, it may help us all out with the exact problem.

[cvar]

Hmm, this news article seems particularly relevant (misdirected clicks):

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/dns...7#.T_dCoPX0q2s