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Potential Hard Drive Issue

JamesKeenanJamesKeenan Registered User regular
edited September 2009 in Help / Advice Forum
Actual symptoms highlighted if you don't want to read this all.


OK. I've had a thread about this issue before, but I want to ask this question one more time before I dedicated ~$60 to a new harddrive.

As it stands now, my issue is this.

I will get seemingly random, arbitrary application hangs. Often Explorer itself hangs. Sometimes these hangs less only 30 seconds or so. And it may be a while before they happen again.

Most of the time, however, they last minutes, and it's only 30 seconds before it hangs again. Initializing shutdown during one of these "episodes" usually results in a really long shutdown time.



Inexplicably, a recent temporary "fix" I've been using is to shutdown the computer (through any means possible), unhooking the hard drive from the computer, and plugging it back in. I cannot fathom why this would work, but it does. Just shutting my computer off and on does not fix the issue, and in fact in the past has resulted in "disc read errors" if I simply shut it down and boot it back up during an episode. Which then results in me having to do startup repair maybe twice and then a disk check before my computer will work at all again. I can't understand why the hell would unplugging the hard drive works?


Right now, as it stands, if I unplug and reattach the hard drive, the computer will usually run perfectly fine, apphang-free until the next time I turn it off and boot it back up.


I've by now of course run Western Digital's diagnostic tool on my hard drive and it never returns a problem. Startup repair usually reports that it has found an issue, but is uselessly nonspecific on what issue it has found, and often simply states it's an "unknown error" and that I should contact other help for an answer. Disk check rarely turns up something, though it has fixed the System folder before.

Apparently sometimes shutting down during these "hangs" corrupts or destroys my System folder.






Could there be any course of action to solving my problem aside from replacing the Hard Drive. If this thing is going to die on me sometime soon, then I'd like to get it replaced ASAP. But maybe I have some really intricate Virus that I don't know about... right?

I have, admittedly, yet to try a reinstall of Windows. I just intuitively don't believe that would work. Yet, I intuitively can't for the life of me figure out how the fuck unplugging the hard drive would work, where as turning it off doesn't.

JamesKeenan on
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