hard drive/mainboard/i.d.e problems?

[petecc]

Hi,
out of desperation ive joined this forum to ask for some advice so i'm praying you can help.
Every few days or so my computer will just freeze or when i shut my computer down it will not restart and gives me either an 'improper boot device selected' or 'invalid system disk' error.
i pull my i.d.e leads in and out like a maniac for a hour or so until my hard drive finally registers in my bios and my computer boots up and works as normal.
sometimes i hear a click from inside my tower whilst it refuses to recognise the hard drive.
ive got two i.d.e cables with my secondary only a dvd writer on it which will always shows in my bios.
on my master cable i have my hard drive and a dvd rom,
sometimes during this mad hour of pulling my primary i.d.e cable in and out my primary dvd will not show on my bios as well as my main disc.
the first thing i could think of naturally would be my primary i.d.e cable is faulty so i bought 2 more and the problems still occur on the new cables.
Inbetween these problems my computer and all programmes and performance levels are fine.
any suggestions or help would be much appreciated,
thanks in advance,
Pete
 

[Deerpark]

Welcome to the forum petecc.
It sounds like you may have a dying hard drive to me, the clicking noise is a bad sign. This can very well be what is know as the click of death.
Do you know the brand of your hard drive? You will need to test it with a diagnostics utility from the manufacturer of the hard drive.
I would also recommend you start backing up everything on the disk you don't want to loose.

[petecc]

Hi Deer,

thanks for the welcome and the reply 

i think ive fixed it,

i only got the one click on loading , nothing multiple
it's a 320 gig western digital, less than 2 years old.

i took the hard drive to a friend's house,
set it as slave, deleted a lot of files (as it was nearly full) then defragged it,

i took it home and put it back as master in my own pc and it acknowledged and booted it straight away with no problems,
its even booting up faster now.

i hope this maybe is an extra option for someone else to try if they have these same problems,

thanks once again,

Pete

 

[Deerpark]

Well I'm glad it is working for you again, but neither a full nor highly fragmented file system would ever prevent a hard drive from being detected at boot time.
It is more likely the act of removing out the hard drive and taking it to your friend's house shock something inside the drive back in to place, making it work again. (At least for now.)
I would still recommend you test the drive with Western Digital's diagnostics tool, Data Lifeguard Diagnostics, available from here.
http://support.wdc.com/

[quaxo]

I would also recommend backing up and very important files, bookmarks, etc. regularly for a while. Should your drive be dying, this will save you a lot of headaches later. Once a drive dies, there's not much you can do to get anything off of it.