Heya!

Hopefully you guys can save me a headache or three. I run a tower containing both a CD/RW and a DVD/RW drive. I ran a 60 GB HD for years in it without problems, then made the mistake of attempting to add more space.

I purchased a 250GB drive and attempted to add it as a slave. It would work for a bit, but it would spin up, click loudly, and lock the machine up.

I figured it was a power issue, so I set it as master, and installed o/s. It worked fine for about three weeks, but now, usually within 5 minutes after boot, it will either make the same click/freeze as before or it will sound like it is powering down, before re-activating itself, again, either freezing me solid or slowing me to a crawl. (Sometimes, B leads to A here.)

Do I have a lemon drive? and if this is the case, how do I go about destroying the data on it without it running before making a warranty claim/returning it (I have alot of confidential work files that the company wouldnt like me to potentially leave behind)

Anything anyone can tell me would be a blessing here...

put it back as slave to the other drive ,and boot to windows ,just right click on the icon for the drive in mycomputer and hit format