2 dead hard drives in a week....

[mattyrobbins13]

Hi guys I'm new to this and having to use my phone so apologise for any typos. Anyway here's my problem that I'm hoping some of you guys can help me with. I'm using an HP laptop that's about 2 years old. It came supplied with vista on but I received a free upgrade to windows 7 so installed that. The system has worked like a dream for about 2 years but a week ago the windows front screen opened up on start up but the side bar failed to load. Anything I tried with the system took ages so I scheduled a disk scan and re-started. This took well over an hour so I had to leave the system and when I returned it had booted up to the exact same point in windows. I next checked the disk from BIOS and got the dreaded message of "replace hard disk 1". Luckily a friend had a hard drive that was the same make and model but slightly smaller capacity. I installed that and put a fresh install of windows 7 on it. I thought that would be the end of my problems yet within a day the system is crashing and within a week I'm in the exact same situation, windows gets to the front screen then I can hear my hard drive ticking over about once every two seconds like its stuck on a loop. I've done a BIOS scan and got the same old message of "replace hard disk 1"

 

Is it possible that my laptop may be killing hard drives? Is there something else I'm over looking? Have I just been very unlucky and maybe the second drive was on its way out? I'm at a loss so any help would be massively appreciated. I don't really have money to buy and kill another drive if I can help it.

 

Thanks in advance peeps.

[KenB]

Hi and welcome to ExTS

 

I can hear my hard drive ticking over about once every two seconds

Is it actually "ticking"

If so - then it looks as if the drive is dying.

 

2 dead drives in as many weeks is worrying - but the second one was "old" so it could just be coincidence.

 

Have you thought about attaching the drive(s) to a second machine and running chkdsk on it ?

(just to confirm)

 

The manufacturer should also have diagnostic software that would give you a truer result.

 

It would be good to be certain before you buy a new one.