Is my hard drive dead after 3 months?

[SLICK RICK]

About 3 months ago, I buily my first system. I put in 3 hard drives, 1x120GB and 2x200GB. Well a few days ago, I started to burn a back-up of one of my dvd's. For some unknow reason the computer shut down and restarted. But it took an unusually long time to start back up. So when it finally did start up, I checked "My Computer" and seen that the drive was there but when I went to open it, I recieve a message stating "This drive is not accessible". So I went into "Disk Management" to check the status of the hard drive and it looked as though it was connected but not active so I tried to reformat the drive. As this is happening a status bar shows and the process makes its way to the very end of the status bar but then pauses and does nothing. About 5 minutes later a message appears and states that the process has failed and asks if I would like to retry.

Any suggestions for a way to try and solve this problem would be greatly appreciated!!

If there is any thing that I did not make clear, Please ask me to explain.

SLICK RICK

[Shudder]

Go to whatever site you got the drive from (maxtor, western digital) and download their diagnostics software. It'll fit on a floppy and run off a boot disk, maybe even run on its own. It'll tell you if there's anything wrong with the drive more than likely. Just be sure to do a thorough test (full surface scan) to better determine the problem.

And if it's messed up, you're going to have to return it. Both of those companies are good about doing returns, and I believe they have a 1 year warranty if not more.

[SLICK RICK]

Shudder,

Thanks alot, I'll give that a try.

SLICK RICK

[SLICK RICK]

I have been doing some reading @ Western Digital Online Forum, and this seems like a common problem with WD hard drives. The sad part is that is seems to be happening to alot of other people a short time a purchasing the drive. I have only had mine for 3 months.

Read a small piece of this guys post taken from the Western Digital Online Forum.

My first wd hdd wd800bb 80gig died after about 2 months of use, the replacement died after 4 hours of operation with 30mb of bad clusters, then the replacement of the replacement died after 3 days with bad clusters.

I did not know Western Digital hard drives failed so quickly, otherwise I would not have bought 2 of them.

SLICK RICK

[redwudz]

I've had 3 Maxtor drives fail in the last couple of years. They were cheap, so I guess I can only blame myself for buying them. I use them in a Raid 0 setup, so they get a lot of use. Fortunately, Maxtor has a good return policy, and I got a new drive in less than a week. I thought WD had better drives, but you never know. At least one of mine I think I messed up myself, but they still exchanged it.

[Solarjetman]

I too have had a Hard drive fail, an IBM.

The hard drive is one of the components most prone to failure. its because the hard drive is one of very few components that has moving parts.

I believe failure rates of hard drives in the short term are around 1%. When you think about it that is fairly large.

I read an article once that interviewed over a 1000 IT professionals and over half said that they experienced computer downtime because of hard drive failure the past year.

That is why any IT proffesional worth their salt runs any important servers in a RAID formation that protects agianst failure.