I have a 4 yr old IBM Aptiva, running W98SE with 4 GB drive, 256 memory on a 266 K6 with mmx. I have just had a new burner installed and a second hard drive of another 4 GB, but when I got it back the sound was not working. In Multimedia under Audio it was blanked out and in Device Manager under My Computer the listing for Sounds, Video & Games was totally gone. I took it right back and they now say my hard drive is failing. I am not very techy at all, I just wondered if I could get an opinion or two. I had no other signs, no messages, everything else works just fine. Can someone give me an idea of the signs of hard drive failure and what the life expectancy of one is please? Thanks very much.

You can run scandisk 'thorough' and it will give you a pretty good indication of your hard drives condition. A few bad sectors is ok, but if you have a lot and if they keep cropping up, then it's about that time. A sure sign of adrive going bad is a clinking or clunking sound. Actually any unusual noise is bad.

Maureen,there really is not a way to determine the life of a hard drive or any other component as it depends on to many factors such as heat dust cold and how much it is used etc.usually when a hard drive fails it will start making strange noises.you can run a thorough scan-disc and see if you are starting to get bad clusters or sectors,another sign of a failure in the making.as for the sound i doubt if is related to a bad drive but more to a driver not being re-installed properly or not at all.I would take it back and have them check it for that.

Thanks to both of you, I know I asked a hard question with the life span thing. I had NO clunking before, only a tiny bit, while I was transfering some stuff, after I got it back from installing the second drive.

Loosing the multimedia is not a sign of hard drive failure. You may be able to reload the multimedia stuff by going to "windows setup" in "add/remove programs" in control panel. As mentioned above, the results of a thorough scandisk should be enough to tell you the condition of your hard drive.

There are various signs for failing hard drives. Losing devices is NOT one of them. You may of loss the device because THAT device failed. If you are running 98 you could go to DOS and run SCANREG and go to a previous registry and it should restore your sound drivers. If it doesn't changes are that device is not functioning. If the hard drive is not making any unusual noises, those drives are probably just fine.

Gotta say (and I might be wrong) that your symptoms don't exactly yell out as being a HD falling apart. As has been mentioned lots of repeated errors in scandisk is how they usually go, and/or with "physical noises". Yes, sure it's difficult to estimate life but so far I don't think I've ever heard of a HD that has failed within two years from new. After that it's luck of the draw, sometimes computers hit the trash bin with perfectly good HD's, others lose them after a few short years.