Help! Hard drive acting weird.

Hi! I am new to this site. Please be patient with me.

Lately, my Thinkpad've been acting weirdly. It's a R32 P4 1.8Ghz. I have been using it for 4 years and works beautifully until lately. The system will boot up normally and I can use it for a while (ranges from half an hour to an hour). Then the hard drive will start to make some strange noise, the light will comes on and seems like it's scanning for something. This will freeze up the machine for about a minute and everything will go back to normal.

This will happen more and more frequent until the hard drive light will just stay on (but it's not making any more noise) and nothing will work (Can't shut down the machine from start menu nor start any application) excpet I can still move the mouse pointer. When this happen, an error window will pop up "Windows System Error - Unknown hard error". There is no error code and if you click "ok" it will show up again.

If I leave it on for a while and try to start something later, the windows taskbar and all the shortcut on the desktop will disappear. However, the background will still be there. If I still leave it on, eventually the screen will go black and the error "PXE - E61" will show up.

Does anyone have any idea what's happening? Virus? Spyware? Bad sectors on hard drive? Hard drive dieing? Othe hardware problems like Bios problem or overheating?

Even though I am planning to get a new notebook soon, I was hopeing to keep this as a backup machine. If it is hard drive problem, I don't mind spending money to get a new hard drive. However, I am not sure if that's the issue.

Any help or suggestion are appreciated.

Thanks.

 

HD Tune is a good hard drive utility if you want to try it. Loud noises are generally not good from a hard drive. I would suggest making a backup of any data you cannot afford to loose.

Link

 

Can it be bad sectors on the drive?
In theory, moving the files from bad sector to a good sector should fix the problem.

I would backup the drive while you still have access to the drive.

 

4 years = time for a new HD. backup what you want now and buy a new one.

 

I myself had the "loud noise" syndrome and yea evertually u dont get that hour or so of worktime. I regret not backing up myself.......

 

Thanks for the suggestion. I downloaded the software and ran benchmark seems fine. Ran error scan (quick scan), no bad sector found. The health tab shows everything as ok. I am using the notebook now and has been about half an hour. It is starting to act strangely again... I hope I can post this reply before it hang...

Thanks.

 

I do have the habit of backing up the important files (my wife to thanks... ) like photos, mp3 and documents. So, I am fine if the hard drive actually die. I am just not looking forward to re-installing windows and all the softwares that I have installed over the years (I guess first I have to find them). So, did you get the strange errors too? Are the symptoms similar to mine? And I guess you replaced the hard drive?

Thanks.

 

You can run virus/spyware dectors or use XP system restore to restore it to a date where this was not happening. If that fails, a clean install of Windows should indicate whether it is a hardware or software issue.

 

If you know the brand, try going to the manufacturers website and use their diagnostic tools. Some are run online while you have to download some of them. Run it and it should tell you if your hard drive is ok or failing.