Too weird... same thing happened to me two nights ago. WD 3.5 Gb drive.
The scan disk that auto started on Win 98 reboot seemed to me to be
completely stalled and going nowhere. CAD'd and re-started. Did a
surface scan in Norton Disk Doctor in Win 98 GUI. Eventually had the
same noise and stall. I trust NDD more than MS's scan disk so I let NDD
do it's work.

        End result is one bad cluster on HDD and one 10.1 Gb IBM drive that
came from Cheap Drives in the mail today. HDD seems to be fine with but
one bad cluster marked and therefor avoided in the future. I really
don't think the drive is going south but it gave me a  sane and rational
excuse to buy lots of Gb's for relatively little money. ;-)


        Recommend that you be safe and consider the value of your data and
the effort needed to start over from scratch. Get a new drive for backup
if you only have one now. HTH

"G. C. Raynes" wrote:
>
>  I have a PII-300 using Win98 and a 6.4 gig Western Digital HD. Everything
> has been running fine until last night when I tried to use the computer
> after it had been idle for a few hours. Everything was locked up so I hit
> reset. When Windows tried to run scandisk after the reset it would go to a
> certain point of the surface scan and stop with a clanking noise coming from
> the HD. If I hit reset again and cancel scandisk,  it boots normally but
> does this every time I try to run scandisk.  Any ideas? Is my HD dying?  The
> HD is only about 6 months old but I did swap it from another computer to
> this one and did a complete reformat, but it had been acting fine for the
> couple of weeks since.  Any help would be very much appreciated.
> Thanks.
>
> Gary Raynes


Jim Mullen  [log in to unmask]

Always remember and never forget: "No matter where
you go...there you are." Buckaroo Banzai

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