Yesterday, my trading pc starting making this clock-ticking noise. soon after, I got the blue screen of death. after few restarts followed by few more blue screens, my pc just brings up black screen(after bios). all fans are running. could this be a harddrive issue?
Most likely. Now is the time to use your backup/clone/image restore functions. If it were not for the "clock-ticking noise", I'd also suspect the mobo battery. You might want to test/change that first... only a $2 part.
turned out to be the hard drive.....replaced and fixed. now i gotta play around with the video cards.......hope to get it in order for the closing. thx all
did you get all your data off? I've gotten pretty good recently at data recovery. I'm also really cheap - like beer money cheap (parts & materials plus throw me a bone) and I'll also be straight with you and tell you whether or not I can handle getting you 100% of the data before I open up the drive and ruin it for someone more qualified. Sorry to solicit but it sucks when you lose a drive and have to evaluate whether or not it's worth spending that much cash to get the data back.
Nice to know of an honest source for recovering data from a failed drive. Of course I hope I never need it but I'll keep you in mind. Thanks!
You should never "NEED" to get data off of a failed drive... except perhaps for very recent stuff... you (all of us) should have proper backups so that a drive failure is little more than an hour's worth of inconvenience to restore. (Of course I know you get this... posted for others who will read.)
The irony in it all is I had to learn the hard way... That saying "a plumber's pipes always leak" is (or was) very true with some of my home computer/IT setup. Clients have never gone down and short of something catastrophic that takes out all of Manhattan they also won't lose data... But I learned the hard way that a user can still manually (accidentally) delete data off a perfectly running RAID6 array, and, that my wife was using the netbook as a place to store all of her pictures, music and files with zero backup. Data recovery isn't hard. If the drive is 100% dead (won't spin up or the arm won't articulate) you just buy three (or sometimes four) extra HDDs (exact copies) on eBay (must be same HW and Firmware versions) and open up the dead one and swap the platters over into the good drive. Once you get it running you just copy the data over to the 3rd (good) drive and at that point I usually also copy onto a second good drive so that I can return ship via two different carriers (or I host it and they download it). The cost is for the extra HDDs. Most bigger shops charge $1,500+++ for real data recovery because they need to mark everything up AND pay decent wages. My time isn't that valuable but you still need to buy the extra HDD and perform all the work in a CLEAN environment.
Easier yet... use backup/imaging software like Acronis or Macrium. I've used Acronis for several years... had to "restore image" several times, never a failure. I keep 2, external drives with images... about once per month I make backup images of my entire HDD/SSD... alternating external drives + make daily data backups onto USB drives. (Years ago... conscious then of the need for backup... I had a routine to make 3 copies of data, daily. As fate would have it, I managed to hose all 3 of them... AND THE ORIGINAL... with one click of the mouse. Fortunately, I had 4th copy on a separate drive...) Of course I don't look forward to a drive failure... but I don't live in fear of one either. For those running sans backup routine... you're playing with fire. As they say, there are only 2 kinds of computer users... those who have had drive failure and those who are waiting for theirs. ALL DRIVES WILL FAIL, EVENTUALLY... if you're running without backups, it's your own fault if you lose everything.
About an year ago i lost a PC - same clicking sound of hard drive and then complete silence. After wasting a ton of time i reckon the harddrive failed; and i had no idea what data was on it and i lost it all. Must have lost a bunch of home videos and pics. After postponing taking backups for ever i finally got an external HD and made backups of the other trading pc and laptop. Been a while since my last backup; clock ticking.. time i take another backup. I bought a norton ghost cd a long time ago (maybe 6years or so) but never used it; so i figured i will use opensource this time. Currently using DriveImage XML for images. Not sure if it will work or not; time to get acronis i suppose. -gariki