Hard Drive Errors

vegeta_666

For the past couple of weeks my hard drive has been giving me issues. When attempting to play most (probably all) games on my computer, at random points during gameplay my hard drive will begin to make a clicking noise. The game will stutter, sound will cut out and then the computer will crash, giving me a blue screen of errors and then restarting itself.

This only occurs when running games off of Steam, and I've never had an issue with internet browsing. (This is my gaming desktop so not much else is on here)

It happens frequently with some games and rarely with others. For example, I played co-op through Borderlands this weekend for 10-12-ish hours and never once had a problem. Playing Darksiders gives me the issue after 30-ish minutes of gameplay usually during combat. Playing Gotham City Imposters, it'll happen randomly and infrequently. It did seem to disappear after running chkdsk but however it has returned and is proving to be problematic. I've sent an e-mail to the customer support of where I bought it from (it is only 3-ish months old) but I fear my hard drive is dying and I will have to acquire a new one. (Hopefully through an RMA)

I'm wondering what the real issue is and if I can fix it myself.

darkmayo

Clicking is never a good sound, i'd probably back your important stuff and get a replacement

Irridan

As darkmayo said, back up your important files. You could try running a more powerful tool than diskcheck, but clicking noises is not a good sign. It's a long shot, but try changing your sata cable - I had a hard drive that would hardlock at times and it turned out to be nothing more than my sata cable.

Essee

Luiane wrote: »

As darkmayo said, back up your important files. You could try running a more powerful tool than diskcheck, but clicking noises is not a good sign. It's a long shot, but try changing your sata cable - I had a hard drive that would hardlock at times and it turned out to be nothing more than my sata cable.

Yeah, basically this. I did indeed have an issue with a hard drive once (would make Firefox suddenly not respond, and then eventually make the machine blue screen after everything else refused to work) where swapping/reseating the SATA cable fixed it. The drive is still working just fine about two years later! So, double-check both cables plugged into the drive. If that doesn't do anything, though... yeah, I'm pretty sure your drive is boned. This stuff shouldn't happen after three months, so unless it's a connection problem you really ought to just RMA the drive after your backup and a new one should take care of it.