So my six year old XP (Pent 4) machine has never given me a lick of trouble. This morning while reading updates on the weather the tower started to give a continuous alarm sound and for the first time ever I could hear the HD churning away. Since everything was locked up I forced a shut down. The thing that has me perplexed is that when I rebooted it never attempted to run the disk check and it has been fine all day. Any theories and is my HD getting ready to die? Thank You!
6 years old....yes more than likely your hard drive has gone over its MTBF rating by a factor of at least 2 or 3...and it's more than overdue to jump off the cliff.
mine is almost 6 years old too..unplug all cables on your pc..remove HD put it in a bag leave it in the freezer for like 2-3 hours..when ou remove from freezer clean moist.. start cleaning inside your pc,fans,cable...dust,etc.. unplug pc for at least 4 hours..if you can leave it unplug overnight=better. -after puting everything back,run antivirus,malwarebytes...if find any virus,,empty system restore.run disk cleaner like ccleaner or WIPE.run checkdisk... Then defrag HD... good luck,hope this works for you.,,it did on my machine and my HD is almost 6 years old too.
The freezer trick sometimes works for unsticking a failed hard drive. It is not a fix, however. It's a trick used to try to get data off of a failed hard drive where the bearings went south. We use this often to try to copy data from a clients hard drive if it's really failed and not being detected. You slave it to a good PC..and hopefully you can browse it and copy what you need before it heats up again and seizes. Replace hard drive. When it starts failing...it continues to fail, gets worse and rowse, it's all downhill.
