Is my harddrive of Windows blowing up?

And of course, I do the title wrong where it should say "or" instead of "of".

Anyway,

I'm playing WoW as normal, doing a big raid. Out of nowhere, my computer locks up, my speakers have a very odd (and hurtful) screech coming out of them. I can still hear people talking over teamspeak, but my monitor has shut off like it has no input coming to it anymore. The computer is still running at normal speed. Seems as how my monitor isn't displaying anything and a ctrl-alt-del would be no good, I restart my computer.

Bootup is unusually slow. Once it's about ready to get into windows, it's checking the CD for a boot disk, then tells me to put one in. I reboot again, this time checking BIOS to see if anything's overheated, and the processor is at 45 celcius, normally around 42. Try booting up again, this time going into windows to attempt a repair. It won't actually load up the screen this time, so I reboot again, this time I don't touch anything. Oddly, it boots completely into windows. I'm able to do everything as normal, til I try to load up WoW, as I get in-game, it pauses for about 5 seconds, then everything dies again (this time without the screeching.) Try booting up again, similar process as before, I actually try to repair windows, surprisingly the screen loads this time. Although, I tell it to repair, and it's telling me there's no harddrive detected. Great.

I reboot again, trying to get into windows. After a few reboots, I'm finally able to get into it, but I shut it down immediately figuring I ought not be wasting time. Any other bootups will ask me for a boot disk for whatever reason, and if I don't have it in it's "SYSTEM DISK READ ERROR" or whatever appears when it doesn't have anything to boot into.

My question here is, is my Harddrive failing, or have I just corrupted Windows so far that things are going bad. Or is it something else altogether?

Jam it back in, in the dark.

WIth the error you got, it sounds like something got zapped in your hard drive. Did (Can) you run scandisk?

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Last night I tried to run chkdisk, and it was going fine until it was on stage 4 of 5 and paused at 13% for over a half hour. I figured the computer died again, so I rebooted. This time I was getting the same errors again, not able to boot into Windows.

I went to sleep, tried to boot it up this morning. Goes into Windows just fine. I reboot it a few times, still works. Didn't try WoW because I'm not quite ready for that . I try to run chkdisk again, it boots up into it just fine, gets to 24% fo step 4/5 this time and pauses. However, this time I notice something on my case. There's a red light and a green light along with a readout from a temperature thing. When it paused at 24%, the green light was out and the temperature thing was not displaying at all. Upon subsequent reboots, they would not turn on, and of course, the Harddisk was not being detected. I unplugged everything and opened up the case to see if I could see anything, and I couldn't even find dust bunnies. Plugging it back in, it boots into Windows just fine and is now running Chkdisk again. It is now at 28% and climbing, with both the temperature and green light on.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

I wouldn't run Scandisk or defrag on a hard drive that's suffering from mechanical or electrical breakdown. If the drive is corrupting itself due to mechanical or electrical problems, those services will ensure that as much data is destroyed as possible. :\

Slowdown and occasional failure of the drive to initialize is a common sign of drive firmware errors...back your stuff up, and try to put as little stress on the drive as possible. Normally, I'd recommend that you not even start the thing up, but if you don't have a current backup and don't want to pay up for data recovery, you probably don't have much choice in the matter. Once you do finish backing the drive up, you can try a fixmbr command from the Windows recovery shell, though I don't think that it'll help.

Of course, the problem could be with the drive controller, or something else entirely, but my first inclination is that the drive's firmware is munged.

What model drive is it, BTW?

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