Well shit... drive failure.

[Electrofreak]

Alright, so over the past few weeks I've been working on getting my hard drives in better shape. Windows Disk Defragmenter wasn't getting my hard drive fragmentation any lower than 17%, so I downloaded DiskKeeper and got to work on my drives.

My Page file was in 269 fragments. My D drive MFT (master file tables) was fragmented as well. So I made with the DiskKeeper and after several runs had both drives 0% fragmented. Now all I had to do was consolidate my free space on the drive by packing my folders together, as well as defragmenting my Page file and my MFTs. I ran a DiskKeeper boot-time defragmenter a few nights ago and went to bed.

I wake up in the morning and the computer is frozen. An "Unspecified Error" has occurred. I restart and log into Windows XP. My background has been replaced by the Windows XP default. Half my desktop icons are gone. Programs are missing from my Start Menu. My Documents folder is empty. I panic.

Then I open My Computer and do a quick inventory of my drive. Everything is there... just it seems that Windows XP somehow lost many of my user settings, as well as links to many of my programs. So I go and rebuild as much as I can, locating my old My Documents folder and moving the contents to my new empty one etc. Many settings for some of my programs also appear to be missing; for example my Teamspeak Server list is now completely empty.

After a day or so like this, Windows begins to become very touchy. It freezes and crashes periodically. I run some scan disks and tons of errors keep getting found and fixed each time it is run. I decide that I should try and do a repair install on Windows as I assume I have some corrupt system files.

I run repair install, and everything seems to be going well, until about halfway through. In the middle of copying files, it stops, and reports that it is unable to copy the product catalogs and that Setup cannot continue. I try the repair install 2 more times, same result every time. I cancel the Setup process, but then the computer begins to hang at the Windows boot screen. I load up Recovery Console, log in as the Administrator and attempt to move some important files from D drive My Documents folder to my C drive. I get an "Access Denied" every time.

At this point I'm pretty pissed. I installed Windows XP onto my C drive and managed to rescue the majority of my important files. However, the result is I don't have enough drive space to install any games. I'm going to try formatting my D Drive and hope that the dozens of bad sectors that are detected with every disk scan are not the result of any physical damage to the disk surface. I'm not hopeful in this view as the drive often makes a "TICK...ZEEEEEP... TICKTICKTICKTICKTICK!" sound frequently when the drive is being accessed.

So, there is my dilemma. I'm hoping that reformatting will solve the issue (which I somehow doubt) or that my Seagate warranty is still good and they'll replace the drive.

After about half a week of staring at progress bars and pleading with my computer to complete a repair process without crashing, freezing, blue screening, reporting a critical error, telling me that the problem "could not be resolved", or giving me an "Access Denied", I'm pretty damn frustrated.

[Baneblade]

Try repartioning, the whole works, it might be any number of things.

[Kam]

That sound is often made when the motor that spins the disc in the harddrive is going bad. I suggest you buy a new drive; install xp on it, transfer your files, and install all your games on the second drive. It sounds like your main drive is going bad.

[Electrofreak]

I think you're right Kam, the hard drive motor is the most likely culprit.

[Kam]

I only know that becasue it just happened to me. A new 80 GB HD and 6 hours of re-installing later, I'm back to normal.