ive purchased a laptop from a friend of a friend. he brought a newer and better one. the laptop, p4 2.8g 512RAM XP Home Ed 60g HD, i checked the manufacturer and believe that i got a pretty good deal. until i ran into this problem. once in awhile when i boot up, the hard drive (guessing) would make clicking noise. when that happens any programs that i would run would lag and ill get a unknown hard drive error. then xp would shutdown "to prevent a serious problem". I removed the hard drive to check its connector and pins. it looked fine. after i reinstalled it into its bay and booted the laptop again, it worked fine. i tested by opening all my large applications and doing everything possible and it ran smoothly. several days later, the noise would return and so did the error. so im confused and need guidance on what should i do to permanently fix this problem.

I would never had the courage to remove a laptop's hard drive - unless, of course, it was modular. Did you by any chance note the name of the hdd manufacturer?

Often times, manufacturers supply low-level drive checking programs which will test a drive for physical errors / bad drives. For example, Western Digital has one such utility you can download from their website - but of course it only works with WD drives.

Maybe the hardrive has passed or is getting close to 80,000 per minute.

Where did you get the # 80,000 from? I doubt the harddrive is so worn out as that ... the rest of the laptop's specs seem to be relatively new technology. We're not talking about a 7 year old machine here.

cscgal,
the hd manufacturer is hitachi and the model is dk23ea-60.

affleck,
no i dont think it has been that long of usage. i have to agree with cscgal, the comp is pretty new.

Hard drive utility for that drive found here in downloads on the left.
http://www.hgst.com/hdd/support/dk/2/23ea60spec.html

Go to this page: http://www.hgst.com/hdd/support/download.htm

There, you can download the Drive Fitness Test. According to the website, it "performs real-time analysis of your drive to quickly determine whether the drive has a problem."

Seems just what you need!

Theoretical Computer Science is mathematical and abstract in spirit, but it derives its motivation from practical and everyday computation. Its aim is to understand the nature of computation and, as a consequence of this understanding, provide more efficient methodologies.
Sorry I meant to say revolutions per minute If your hard drive emits unusual noises (clicking, grinding or metal scraping).This symptom typically indicates a head crash that can destroy your data. Hard drives spin fast, at high revolutions per minute. Extensive damage can occur quickly buddy.
Maybe someone ran eraser8.9 on that bad boy till it wore out :lol:

Sorry that was for DOD supercomputers HD's ---- Damaged 80,000 Rpm. It should be more like

READ/WRITE HEAD

Definition: [n] (computer science) a tiny electromagnetic coil and metal pole used to write and read magnetic patterns on a disk

Synonyms: head

See Also: coil


3,600 to 7,200 RPM. Average HD----- 7,200 to 15,000 Damaged HD

I suggest Back Up and download some recovery tools.

hi. ty for the link. the test prgm wont work on my laptop because itll stop right after the section creating a boot disk. at the section i only have one option and that is to create a boot disk in the A drive, which i do not have. is there any other programs i can test my drive or can i override the section.

Sorry, the only way to run the test program is off of a floppy disk which boots on startup. You cannot skip that section because that skips creating the program you want to run! See if you could borrow an external USB floppy drive from someone.