help! something went kapoot

[shokpin]

so my system hangs, mouse moving but the OS is frozen
i wait a minute, hit CTR-ALT-DEL and nothing
hit the reset button and during bios system check my hhd's take for ever, then dont detect
i notice the 1 yr old WD Caviar 60g has a high pitched whirr on power up/down (worse on down)
i begin to remove the drive from the system and as im pulling out the power cord it sounds odd, best way to describe it is that it sounds like the 'crinkling' you get from opening a peppermint or jolly rancher.

i leave my old 8gig WD Caviar in (storage) and the system has no problems recognizing the drive.

take it out and put the 60 back in, again the BIOS arent able to identify it

i let it sit several hours while im at school and meetings, come home and still no good
i take it and pop it into my brothers computer as slave
works fine! (not running OS) WTF?! i say to myself

take it back to my system and it boots up okay.....runs for 5min then it then freezes again and upon restart is no longer working w/BIOS
try it a few times, BIOS wouldnt even boot this time

disconnect the drive and pop it back here into my bro's comp and its doing fine as far as copying/moving/deleting/displaying data
its still got that HIGH pitched whirr, which surely isnt a good sign but no faults in terms of use

im running a 1.2 GHZ Athlon, Abit KT7A-R mobo, GeForce 3, Soundblaster Live! 5.1 Value, Linksys 10/100

anyone out there have any ideas on what could be causing the problem? my first thought was hhd, but its still working here as a slave

 

[shokpin]

ok well i just swappe out the IDE cable

things seem to be decent so far

still gonna send the 60g back, not gonna wait for it to burst into flames

 

[scriptasylum]

I had a WD I thought was bad too doing the same kinds of things you are describing. I went out and bought a replacement because I didn't want to deal with it at the moment, but eventually discovered the master/slave jumper was quite loose and may be losing the connection from vibration or whatever.

But the "crinkling" sound you heard sounds suspiciously like electrical arcing, which would be caused by a poor solder joint on the power connector or poor power cable. Take a close look at the power section of the drive's controller card. Wiggle the connector gently and see if the solder joints on the controller are loose.

 

[shokpin]

well i dont have teh chance right now to take a closer look but i know that the power cable connection was much more moveable than it should be...it had some slight play to it vertically that i know shouldnt be there

the master/slave jumper is another good idea
i'll be sure to keep on eye on it

in a few hours i'll be able to look at the hhd more closely

thanks script

 

[Jahya]

It sounds like the drive has some issues of its own, but one other thing to look at is the jumper settings. When I installed my new drive (Maxtor DiamondMax 80 gig Ultra ATA133) last night, I initially left the jumper in the "cable select" slot and the system did not recognize the drive, even though my other drive (Maxtor 40 gig ATA100) was set to "cable select" as well and it recognized that one with no problems. I took them both out and switched my OS drive to master and made the new drive a slave and all is well....

 

[rettahc]

All western digitals built withion the last 2-3 years are crap, the quality of these drives has severly deteriorated in my opinion. in the last yearand a half - 2 years i have rma'd quite a few 6 montyh old WD drives.