HDD problem - doesn't like large writes

My 2nd HDD has been a bit flakey for a while. It doesn't seem to like writes of anything more than a few megabytes (and has decided to swap letters with my dvd drive, don't know if its related). It won't defrag either. Is this it on its way out or some software problem? I know hdds are cheap these days but being skint I'd prefer not to replace it.

 

Backup the important files asap!
You can try booting a Linux Live to see if its a software problem.

 

Definitely looks like the HDD is going out. Back up as much data as possible from it. Run a hardware diagnostic on it from with a utility provided from the manufacturer of the drive. Chances are that it will fail due to the symptoms you described.

 

Cheers, will track down a diagnostic in a bit. My two external usb drive caddies contain 1tb sata drives, will i literally be able to swap the faulty drive for one of those and keep all data on the previously external drive intact as it was before?

 

Well as long as you transfer the data from the bad drive to a working drive, when you buy a replacement you can simply copy it back to the new drive.

 

It could be a loose cable, or maybe the cable is going bad. Check that both ends of the cable are firmly plugged in and try a spare IDE/SATA cable if you have one.

 

If it was loos cable he'd get more serious errors. By the looks of it, this is an external drive if I read his last post correctly.

 

Apolagies, i should have stated it was an internal drive to begin with. I'm talking about swapping out the faulty internal for the drive out of one of my external drives. They are all NTFS.

In disk management the faulty drive (E is being described as the system, active and primary partition and its disk 0. Vista is installed on the other fully functioning internal drive (C and is described as boot, page file, crash dump and primary partition and is disk 1. Would I bee able to swap out (E for a drive from an external caddy with no upsets?


edit: have tried booting both the drives on their own and neither starts vista, so I guess Vista is confused as to which drive vista is actually on? Is it something to do with E: being disk 0, or that it is 'system' and 'active'?

 

problems sorted now, cheers. It was that the boot sector was on e: drive. Have fixed that and swapped that faulty drive.