Bad hard drive?

[EvanED]

Not sure whether this should go in the help desk or here, but whatever.

I have some symptoms that suggest to me that one of my hard drives is in its death throes. I want to know what you guys think, and whether there's something I can look at. (SMART data says both drives think they're healthy.) I have two hard drives: a 500 GB Hitachi from Aug 2007 and a 2 TB Western Digital green from Aug 2010. The Hitachi contains the OS, but I think that Grub may live on the other. Normally grub comes up for a couple seconds during boot to give me the option of starting I think Fedora, then Grub gives way to the Windows loader, which gives me the option of starting a Wubi-installed Ubuntu (so sitting on an NTFS partition).

Here's what happened this morning:

• My computer would occasionally pause for 2 or 3 minutes (most programs -- but not all -- unresponsive; Win7) with the hard drive light on solid. After doing this for a couple minutes it would come back to life for a bit.
• On the third or fourth time it did this, I left for about 5 minutes; when I returned, it had BSOD'd with a stop error 0xF4. (That's all the information I kept, unfortunately.)
• I hit the reset button, later actually turning it off and back on, and it basically wouldn't come back up. The system seemed to go through POST okay, but neither Grub nor the Windows loader came up, it just sat there.
• I unplugged a random drive which happened to be the Western Digital, and then it started back up and booted fine.
• I then replugged in the Western Digital, and booted again. Unfortunately I didn't try going to Windows, just Ubuntu, and that's where I looked at the SMART data.

So... any thoughts? It doesn't sound like a Windows problem to be because of the booting thing. But unfortunately, my diagnostic attempts didn't help much with "which drive is it", though if I had to guess I'd of course guess it's the Hitachi. I'm thinking of rushing an SSD from Newegg so fast replies are appreciated.

[mosc]

Sounds more like a boot loader issue than a dieing hard drive. I've never run a setup quite like you're describing though so I don't know what "normal" behavior and issues would look like. In my experience with HDD failures, they rarely start a boot up process broken and then work fine afterwards. It's generally the other way around.

I say a boot loader because the part where you said w7 loads and pegs the hard drive for a minute or two sounds like it's re-establishing it's swap file structure. That's typical when another OS has stepped on something and windows gets grumpy.

when was the last time you re-formatted and re-installed the OS on your HDD? The answer is probably way WAY too long ago. If you're serious about diagnosing the problem and not just finding a convenient reason to replace the whole mess, I would say back up all your stuff and clean house. A good lobotomy every few months really helps things. Less often for your casual internet browser user, more often for your multi-OS power user. Honestly, if your entire OS setup is more than 6 months old, I'd say that stinks as the culprit like rotting cheese.

[EvanED]

In my experience with HDD failures, they rarely start a boot up process broken and then work fine afterwards. It's generally the other way around.

Not that this may fundamentally change anything, I only used it for a couple minutes after it successfully booted.

I say a boot loader because the part where you said w7 loads and pegs the hard drive for a minute or two sounds like it's re-establishing it's swap file structure. That's typical when another OS has stepped on something and windows gets grumpy.

This doesn't sound likely to me; I've got both other OSs on there, but I almost never use them. I can't remember the last time when I booted that computer not in Windows. So the "another OS stepping on something Windows cares about" doesn't sound right.

The other thing that sounds strange about your theory is that there wasn't any lead-up to this; it's worked fine (except -- admittedly -- for one crash two days ago, but it worked fine yesterday).

[mosc]

Back up your stuff and re-install windows on a clean formatted drive. See how that goes.