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Hard drive problems
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So I had a little problem with my hard drive last week (I think it got bumped around while I was moving house), but I plugged it all back in and it seemed to sort itself out. Yesterday however, I was playing X3 and it became really unresponsive, sticking on menus and taking an age to load. It ended up crashing with a hard reset, and checkdisk ran on the next start up (and froze). After a few more startups checkdisk finished, and it found some problems with the C partition which it seemed to fix, but the speed of the computer is still really slow. X3 still sticks badly, and the load times of Dark Messiah have jumped to literally five to ten minutes. The hard drive makes sad clunking noises sometimes, but it's been doing that for a long time, they've just become more frequent.
I'm defragging right now, which might help, but does anyone have any other ideas? I'd really rather not replace the whole drive, it's got loads of shit I need on it.
I'm defragging right now, which might help, but does anyone have any other ideas? I'd really rather not replace the whole drive, it's got loads of shit I need on it.
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What are you using to defrag and how badly did it say the drive was fragmented?
Is this the same drive that holds your swap file? Operating system?
How much free space?
Free space is good, but 33% fragmentation is pretty bad, especially 33% according to Windows defrag, which is inexplicably terrible. I would recommend something like Diskeeper. You could see a sharp performance increase clearing up heavy fragmentation like that, especially if it includes system files and the swap file. It should also take a little strain off of your drive, more good news if those noises are an indication of decrepitutde.
It sounds like the drive is on it's way out anyway, if you have everything backed up you can continue to use it and see what happens without fear of losing everything.
If a hard drive is becoming corrupted or making "funny noises" you've very, very likely got a limited amount of time to get the data off before it dies. In a sense, you're lucky - some kinds of failures are sudden and catastropic, with no warning.
Vigorously exercising the drive via a defrag is like telling a guy with a heart condition to hit the treadmill.
If you can keep the drive running, you can put another one in next to it and do an image copy. This will preserve all your data, programs, everything. Of course, if the data is corrupt, that corruption is going to migrate to the new drive. It's a tough call, but at least you won't have the bad drive further messing stuff up.
Other drives work for years silently, then make terrible noises once and corrupt 30% of the drive before you can bring them back from the dead and start recovery.
Noise indicates atypical operation, but is not always indiciative of near or immediate failure; nor is it required precursor.
It sounds like your hard drive is one step from completely dieing on you.
If I were you? Buy a cheap HDD, set up your old HDD as a slave and backup all your shit.
most of all, most of all
someone said true love was dead
but i'm bound to fall
bound to fall for you
oh what can i do
srsly. Were I you I'd be glad it's still working at all. Sad clunking noise = bad++. Since you're getting a new one this weekend at the earliest, try to lay off using it too much until then.
Also, if you can't find your windows disk, you might want to consider using something like Ghost (norton) or TrueImage (acronis) to copy the disk straight across and skip reinstalling everything. I had the same thing happen to me not too long ago, and trueimage copied everything and expanded the partition to fill the new, bigger hard drive with 0 problems. Windows didn't even seem to notice anything had changed. :^:
Edit: I forgot to mention, you can get trueimage on a 15 day trial and use it for this one time copy without having to pay for it.
CHESS!
You can't straight copy the disk, you need to clone it to preserve the boot record and such. Poked around usenet, http://www.runtime.org/dixml.htm is a freeware imaging utility that can restore an image to equal or larger partition. I've used Runtime's file recovery utilities before, and I liked them so I'll recommend it.
Basically, you will make an image of your current HD, then restore it to the new one.