Geek advice please

[cheekbones3]

Okay, after my recent PC issues, my latest diagnosis is that my hard drive is banjaxed. The behaviour is now that it'll run in safe mode if it's standing up, but if it's on its side, it won't run at all, which sounds distinctly mechanical to me. Would anyone agree with this assessment?

That leads me on to what I should do next. I've rescued a load of files onto my external hard drive at least, so I shouldn't in theory lose anything important.

My options appear to be as follow:

1) Use the external HD as the main drive, but I don't want to do this.
2) Get hold of another hard drive. Is this easy to do, and are there compatability issues?
3) Anything else?

The main problem I see is that I don't have an original XP disk, since the person I bought the computer from didn't know where it was, and I don't know if it's possible to transfer the OS from an old drive to a new one, and I don't want to anyway, a fresh installation would be nice.

Your thoughts please!

Comments

[red-phil.livejournal.com]

It sounds mechanical, but not necessarily inside the drive.
It could be a cable that is loose or with worn insulation.
When the PC is on its side, they could pull out a bit or short against the case etc.

As a 1st step I'd disconnect and reconnect each cable and check for worn insulation.

[cheekbones3.livejournal.com]

Will do. Seems a bit unlikely that it's an external problem - it was running well for a while earlier (until it went blue screen...), and even now it's running fine in safe mode, and a boot scan earlier showed no sector problems. Graah.

[409.livejournal.com]

If a drive is dead, then it generally fails to run at all. hmm, odd one. Could be a bearing fail on the drive, check the cables and isolate. try the smart drive tester and that'll see if the drive is happy.

if the drive is totally shot, then getting a new one is quick and easy (cheap too). However if you have no XP CD then you would need to get hold of one (I see no reason you can't reuse the existing license key, you can get it out of XP in safe mode). That would be the only problem. Failing that you could image the old hard drive onto the new one so windows doesn't need a reinstall, this can be done with free to download software.

[cheekbones3.livejournal.com]

I ran a boot scan and it came out clean, so I'm assuming it's mechanical. I'll have a look at the cables.

Where would I get a smart drive tester? Or is that what I've already done?

[409.livejournal.com]

you already kinda have, this sort of thing will do it:
http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/Hard-Disk-Utils/Active-SMART.shtml

check the cables and see if you can cause a failure when the machine is running happily. if you can then cable is the answer. if not then move the drive 90 degrees while running and listen for an odd noise as it fails - any grinding noise or similar could be the head, platters, or bearing moving in a bad way. beyond that i'm not sure without seeing it.