> What are the symptoms of a hard drive going bad?

Generally there are two ways a hard drive dies, the quick way and the slow
way.

The quick way is just that, one day you turn on the PC and the drive just
doesn't work, either it spins up and then stops or it just never spins up.
This generally has been the most common mode of hard drive failure in my
experience. Sometimes if you retry enough time you might get the drive
working, if so back up whatever you can, because the drive probably won't
work again.

The slow way is more graceful, the first symptoms are usually bad sectors.
Now, I want to stress that a bad sector or two does NOT necessary mean that
the drive is on it's last legs. However, if you seem to get another bad
sector every few days this generally means the drive is going, I suggest you
backup quickly and junk the drive.

Hard drives are generally very reliable considering their complexity, but
certain brands seem to be more prone to early deaths than others. In my
experience WD and Fujitsu have been the worst, while IBMs have generally
been the best. This by no means means that ALL of the drives made by these
companies are the same, I'm sure you'll find many who will swear by their
Fujitsu, and probably just as many who swear that IBMs are the worst junk
drives in the world, I'm just giving my opinion based on my experience. As
with everything though you definately get what you pay for when it comes to
hard drives. TTYL

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