[luvclubbin]

Recently, my hard drive starting acting a bit differently than normal. After the computer had been started up and whil the startup programs at my desktop were loading, my hard drive would go into a brief series of spinning and then slowing down. It would do this about three times and then on the fourth round there was a bit of vibration. At the same time that this started occuring I would also start getting an error message for Windows Explorer whenever I opened certain folders. Any reason for this errartic behavior, I would presume that my hard drive is dying even though I have only owned for about 2 years. Of course it is OEM for Dell which may play a big role.

 

[dustyjay]

although most hard drives will last yeaars and years (as evidence i have 4 sub-gig drives that are at least 10 years old that are still running and I use them to store downloaded installation files on), it is not uncommon for a newer drive to give up the ghost after a shorter time. Seem the manufacturers caught on to this hence the reason so many warranties are only 1 year now instead of the old standard 3 years. And dell does not use drives that are any worse than any other manufacturer. Suggestion. Back up your data now and keep frequent backups until you can get a new drive to replace the possibly failing drive. This is a bunch cheaper than hiring a company to recover data from a dead drive.