so i bought my computer last year in december but now its arleady making really weird noise and to me it sounds liek a hard drive. i know what a hard drive sounds like and im not copying anything on my hard drive or anything but it just makes this really creepy noise that gives me the chills so my question
do you know any program i can use for checking if my hard drive is fine or if it will die soon?
do you know any software for checking the well being of my computer in general?
When I worked at a computer shop we used to run a basic scan disk and a full defrag. If the scan disk took longer than what it was supposed to, the drive was fooked. And defragging a full drive (especially if it's messy) will shift a load of files around - again if it takes longer than usual or crashes, then it's also buggered.
Oh and theres a nifty app called Spinrite which checks HDD health.
I have found that windows 9x's DOS scandisk gives you the most information after the surface scan. However, the likelyhood of you having win9x or DOS is pretty slim. Run Scandisk and defrag-- then defrag again. Can you explain the noise? Even new hard drives make noises, so it may not be a problem. If it's freezing or taking long, however, it could be a problem. In any case, you should back up your data every day.
Buy SpinRite. It's the best HDD diagnostic app ever. It runs from a boot floppy or CD, working in low-level DOS. It's coded in x86 assembly; it's quite amazing.