I was running PerfectDisk defreg, and it got stuck/hung at 50%. I had to "hard reboot" my PC. Now it seems my HDD is crashing ... Windows will try and load but it makes repetitive clicking noises when logging on. Once on if I try and move my My Documents folder, I get a "Data Error (Cyclic Redundancy Check)" message, but only for certain files, not all. What's going on? Is there any hope for me? Cheers!

Too late for this suggestion now, but you are usually much better off to run any defrag utility in Safe mode. There are many possible programs you could have running that can interfere with a defrag and make it take a lot longer to complete because the defrag has to restart many times, or the defrag program may freeze. E.g. any program running that automatically does something every so often can cause problems with a defrag program. A common one is you have a screen saver program that did not come with Windows loaded and enabled. Please answer these: Were you experiencing problems with your computer you thought a defrag might fix? If so, what problems were you having? How much free space did you have on the drive before you started the defrag? ... Your data may now be screwed up, or your hard drive may be failing. To rule out the latter, check your hard drive using the manufacturer's diagnostics. See the latter part of response 1 in this: http://www.computing.net/windows95/... If you don't have a floppy drive, you can get a CD image diagnostic utility from most hard drive manufacturer's web sites, but obviously you would need to make a burned CD, preferably a CD-R for best compatibilty, on another computer if you need to. If the hard drive itself is okay, you could try : Start - Run - type: cmd (click on OK) type: chkdsk /f c: (click on OK) (a space between chkdsk and /f, and /f and c:) You will be asked if you want to unload..blah blah .. Answer Yes - Chldsk will run the next time you boot the computer. Don't press any keys when it loads or it will not run. And/or Insert your Windows CD in a drive. Start - Run - type: cmd (click on OK) type: sfc /scannow (click on OK) (a space between sfc and /) System File Checker will examine protected Windows files and replace any found to be corrupted or missing. (you don't necessarily need to go to the cmd prompt, but if you don't any error messages you get will be displayed so fast you won't see them and sfc won't start)

I wasn't experiencing any problems before running defrag. I just needed to run it. This is a 6 yr old 40GB HDD I think I had about 10GB free on it, but I'm taking a good guess here. I ran chkdsk a couple times and it did find piece of files here and there and some errors I think. Right now I'm running SpinRite. Its been going for about 3 weeks!!! Its recovering data, but very, very slowly, obviously. Actually, its stuck on a batch of bad cylinders at about 13%. The program worked fine the first one or two days and then it hit 13% and its been working there for the rest of the time. I know its working because I can actually see it doing work and moving forward, albeit slowly. Really my concern is whether or not my HDD data is recoverable. Since I can boot into windows, although it takes a little longer, and as I can do some work in windows, I'm guessing its some reading part on the HDD that's failed and not the drive/magnetic media. Is that a good conclusion? I'm tempted to try the "freezing method", since after being off for a couple of days then starting SpinRite it had no trouble getting to 13%, then its been slow ever since. ??

Maybe something good will come from your painful experience, if people learn from it and start a backup plan.

You should aways test the hard drive with manufacturer's diagnostics before running SpinRite. Don't run Spinrite if the diagnostics find problems. Spinrite can perform seemingly miraculous recoveries of data, or it can trash your data,especially if there are physical bad or iffy sectors on the drive. It's very risky to run Spinrite on a defective hard drive. Once you start the Spinrite program, don't stop it for any reason even when it seems to take forever. It takes a long time to get past bad sectors because it re-tests those sectors many times - that is normal, but can make Spinrite take a LONG time to complete,

To recover your data, you may have to install the hdd as a slave and then copy what info you can access over. Once this is done, I would low level format the hdd, then fdisk and format. This should show whether or not it is in a good enough condition to retain. Going back to the cause of your problem, personally I am careful to use utilities supplied by the hdd maker or MS. Particularly when such tasks are of a critical nature. I wonder if this comment will open a can of worms. Good Luck - Keep us posted.

Sounds like your hard drive itself is having an issue and is going bad. I'd suggest contacting the hard drive manufacturer and see what diagnostic tools they have available to diagnose what is going on with the drive. Please note that software can NOT cause hardware to go bad. However, software can exercise hardware in a way that it isn't normally exercised and bring to light a hardware issue. Greg Systems Engineer Raxco Support