How do you tell when your hard drive has died?

It still responds, but you can not cancel the operation and it will not do anything. I’ve left it like this for days.

Hours, not days but i can’t seem to edit the question.

Any editing needs to be done in the first 5–10 mins. following posting.

After that, the only way to make changes is to contact one of the mods.

You’re not the first to be frustrated by this rule :)

…and you won’t bebthe last.

Most of us do exactly what you just did and make a separate post with the correction.

Sounds like you have to take it in and have a computer store look at it, I have a lap top do that sort of same thing and it turned out to be a processor and to expensive to fix, yours runs on linux so I don’t think it’s that but they should check it out.

When my desktop did that, it was indeed the hard drive.

If it were the CPU, motherboard, or anything like that, then a Linux disc wouldn’t boot the computer at all either; the fact that it boots and just won’t get your Windows partition is the key bit of info there.

My CD-ROM went bananas. It began spinning a disc that was in it and I tried to stop it but it wouldn’t stop. I hit the button to open the drawer and it opened, disc still spinning madly, and the disc almost flew out of the tower.

@kritiper They usually won’t open while spinning unless you do a “paper clip override”; they generally stop the motor before opening when you hit the button. Of course, that’s when they are working correctly. It wasn’t so bad back in the days when 4x was fast, but modern drives spin the disc at considerably higher RPM, and thus are more “fun” than older drives when that happens.

I have replaced the hard drive and it worked fine for a few days then one of the ram sticks died. /sigh. Why me?