I have a gateway laptop. last week while i was working on a paper the desktop froze, and the hard drive me a kerplunk noise. For 8 hours after that the computer would not boot. If you tried it just grinded away and never made it to pre bootup, just grinded and grinded. I ran a test on the computer to which it failed, i got a message about a servo problem with the hard drive. Miraculously about 8 or 9 hours later it did boot. I had tried multiple times throughout the day to no avail. So when i sent it in to gateway is was working sadly. They told me that the fan wasnt cooling correctly and this could cause the hard drive to crash. Is this correct. It sounds kinda stupid to me to think my hard drive was dead for 9 hours cause the fan wasnt working right. And i mean when it was grinding it sounded like someone was dragging a knife across hard drive plates themselves. Should i worry that it will happen again? I know gateway is garbage anyway but if its gonna break again i wanna know now so i can throw a fit to gateway and get something done about it. So any techs out there who know for sure please respond if you agree or disagree, or with any questions you have about my problem Joseph Knight

I sugest to go to the hard drive's manufactere's web site and download a diagnostic utility, that should tell you if you have a failing drive...Just to be sure, backup all your important files ;) GooD LucK! It's nice to be important but it's more important to be nice...

If you are certain that the noise was from the HD and not the fan(s), don't be surprised if it fails completely in the near future. But I would be surprised if Gateway sends it back with a sketchy drive, so maybe give them the benefit of the doubt for now.

I suspect that gateway was right and the sounds were from the fan and not the hard drive.

basiaclly this is called a head-crash. could you put the name and model on for us, so we can know something about it? Gateway took alook at it, and they fixed the fan. so stop using the hdd, because it is most likely gardbage. oh, and anyone here, dont buy gateway, because they are garbage.