Possible Hard Drive problem

[PrttyTateMachine]

This morning i woke up to my PC frozen. I restarted and everything seemed fine. I tried to run a couple programs and it started to hang follwed by a slight grinding sound followed by a beep. It appears the sound is comming from one of my hard drives. I restarted again and everything seemed fine till i tried to run the same programs as before. So once again i restarted. Not it won't boot at all and i keep hearing the grinding sound followed by the beep. I read on other forums about maxtor drives beeping if the heads and disks aren't moving. The maxtor drive i have is for storage which doesn't explain why it won't boot. I'm not 100% sure it is comming from the harddrive or not but the beep doesn't occur till after the bios and post occur. Can anyone help me? The maxtor drive is maybe a year old and i haven't had problems till now. Thanks for any help you can give me.

[Gettinbye]

If the hard drive in question is only for storage, try disconnecting it and then booting to see if that will solve the problem. *Important Note* If you're running Milennium or XP, try to boot to safe mode and disable (a)system restore and (b)write caching on the hard drive in question or use the "safe removal tool" BEFORE YOU REMOVE IT! XP in particular can be finicky about removing a drive classed as non-removable. Understand that if you can't boot (to safe mode or otherwise) to do so, you'll be taking a chance on losing data, although if the hard drive is hosed that may already be the case.

If after following the above suggestions you find the HDD is fault, you should d/l the software from Maxtor's site and run the tests on it.

Powermax is what you want to use. You'll need a floppy disk to use it.