Hard drive failure on my refurbished laptop?

F

FUCK THE POLICE

911 EVERY DAY
Damo is probably going to be the only one that can say anything about this.

I just bought a refurbished laptop that was about a year old. It was $550 and it had a graphics card that can crush any modern game so I pretty much jumped on it. However, when I start it up I sometimes get an "insert boot media" message, and I have to keep on restarting it until it decides to boot to Windows. Worst of all, I'm hearing a clicking noise that sounds vaguely doomish O_O. I'm really hoping this is my CD drive. Most of the hard drives I've had that got the click o' doom pretty much fell apart right away, though, and this has been functioning alright for two weeks, besides the boot errors.

Have you ever heard of hard drives failing in a single year? I'm thinking this might be why I got it for 550.
 
I used to do tech support for proteva, i've had HDDs fail right out of the box. If it weren't clicking on bootup, i'd say just format the boot sector, but with the clicking, that drive is going to fail.
 
SmarterThanYou said:
I used to do tech support for proteva, i've had HDDs fail right out of the box. If it weren't clicking on bootup, i'd say just format the boot sector, but with the clicking, that drive is going to fail.
Click to expand...

I'm just hoping that I'm misinterpreting the clicking, and that it's coming from some other source. Do they usually last for a few weeks after they start clicking? I'm thinking that maybe someone heard the clicking and immediately sent it in to be refurbished, and that the company heard it and just packaged it up and set it at a low price just to get it out of their hands. The price I paid seems to be around the market price for a computer of this model minus a hard drive.

Unfortunately my 2TB external seems to have become corrupted, so I can't back it up.
 
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i guess i should clarify, the clicking means imminent failure, but doesn't specify how long it can take. i've run drives that clicked for 8 months, then failed. had some go only a week. if it were me, i'd do two things. 1) start saving all my data on another drive... and 2) start looking on newegg.com for the best deal on a new HDD.
 
SmarterThanYou said:
i guess i should clarify, the clicking means imminent failure, but doesn't specify how long it can take. i've run drives that clicked for 8 months, then failed. had some go only a week. if it were me, i'd do two things. 1) start saving all my data on another drive... and 2) start looking on newegg.com for the best deal on a new HDD.
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I'll just grab the one on my old computer. There's nothing important on this one anyway.
 
I didn't read any further than Grinds last post, and somehow thought my post regarding porn on my external would be special.

:( I'm a sad panda.
 
Feel the machine when you turn it on, you may just have a boot sector virus and a noisy CD unit. You'll be able to feel the "clicks" and tell which drive it is coming from. If it is your HD, you'll need a new one but there's no telling when. I believe it will be sooner than later if you are getting device errors at boot up though and I'd back up and put a new drive in.

If it is the CD drive that is clicking (that is possible), then you need to clean your drive and start over, or get some good virus cleaners. I prefer to clean it entirely though as some spyware can hide itself inside "viruses" and plant themselves into hidey-holes when you "clean" them.
 
Damocles said:
Feel the machine when you turn it on, you may just have a boot sector virus and a noisy CD unit. You'll be able to feel the "clicks" and tell which drive it is coming from. If it is your HD, you'll need a new one but there's no telling when. I believe it will be sooner than later if you are getting device errors at boot up though and I'd back up and put a new drive in.

If it is the CD drive that is clicking (that is possible), then you need to clean your drive and start over, or get some good virus cleaners. I prefer to clean it entirely though as some spyware can hide itself inside "viruses" and plant themselves into hidey-holes when you "clean" them.
Click to expand...

What I generally like to do for a thorough clean is to get Hijackthis, note the directories the viruses are stored in, and then boot to linux and manually remove them. I once saw a virus that was apparently able to hide itself from me in linux, though.
 
Yeah, I would think that you get what you pay for. I would never pay for porn, though. Even when I looked at magazines back in my Air Force tech school, it was community "bay" porn, that had been collected and passed along. Since I was there in 2004, I got to have access to the special 50th Anniversary Playboy. :)
 
Threedee said:
Yeah, I would think that you get what you pay for. I would never pay for porn, though. Even when I looked at magazines back in my Air Force tech school, it was community "bay" porn, that had been collected and passed along. Since I was there in 2004, I got to have access to the special 50th Anniversary Playboy. :)
Click to expand...
A membership is $30 a month. Your average porn DVD is 4 hours long, and costs $20, usually with 1 or 2 scenes you do not care for. Since I have no download limit when I join, I take EVERYTHING. Then I typically cancel my membership after a couple weeks. I currently have 1.6 terabytes of porn, almost all of it top quality (from the pay sites) and it amounts to over 1000 hours. This has cost me $90 (special membership rates since I joined one sites). I'd say paying for it this way was the cheapest.

No I haven't watched all 1000 hours yet. Probably never will.
 
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