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I was working on an experimental website earlier today when Vista slightly froze. It also gave a weird write error message that I have never seen before. I figured it was just some weird Vista glitch I had never seen in my life. I reset my computer. Suddenly the computer would not boot to Vista.
[adblockingdetector id=”1″]I have seen this a couple of times in the past, not problem. I just powered down, waited 10 seconds and powered up, same result. Now I started to worry. I booted up to the BIOS and saw that it was not recognizing the main hard drive. Maybe the power or data cable on the hard drive was slightly detached I thought. I opened up the case and all the cables and wires were fine. I started it up once more… then I HEARD the problem.
The main hard drive had a whiny sound coming out of it. The whiny sound faded then came back to life. The sound pattern was very similar to a car that slightly cranks but refuses to start. I knew from experience this was bad, very bad. All the information on this drive will probably be nonrecoverable unless I pay someone $800 to recover it. It is a good thing I had 2 different physical drives on my computer, one with Windows Vista and the other one with all my data.
Luckily the drive that died was the one with Windows Vista installed. My data drive was working fine.Now I am deciding what to do now. Either I purchase a replacement hard drive and start up everything from scratch or I upgrade to something new. I was thinking about purchasing a new motherboard that could support more RAM (8 or more GBs). To have more than 3.2 GB of usable RAM you must have a 64-bit operating system. That is no problem for me since I have Vista Ultimate 64-bit. But I was also thinking about going back to Vista 32-bit since there are very few programs out there that are 64-bit. Other 32-bit programs will not even work in Vista x64. With all that being said I am at a crossroad.
[adblockingdetector id=”5″]During this writing I decided what to do. For the operating system I have decided to reinstall Vista Ultimate 32-bit. With my budget’s sake in mind, I will purchase a replacement hard drive and wait to upgrade my computer when Windows 7 lands on the store shelves in 2010. Then I will purchase a new motherboard that supports 16 GB of RAM, 8-16 GB of RAM (depending on the price) and the fastest Intel Core i7 CPU I could afford. I will be busy working on getting my computer up and running at 100% with all the programs I had installed and tweaked the way I had it. This will probably take a week. This is a huge pain in the butt, but at least I will have a smooth running Vista 32-bit operating system again. No more incompatibility worries.
UPDATE 02/16/09: I am almost back to 100% again. I am glad I had my important files backed up to another hard drive or else I would have been S.O.L.
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Tags: hard drive clicking sounds, HDD crash, HDD fail