HDD dieing?

[htid]

Hi,

I built my computer about 6 years ago now and shamefully have only formatted once or twice in that time. It's worked fine until yesterday when, as I turned it on and it got to the logon screen, it just crashed. Nothing major there I thought, these things sometimes happen. So I restarted it and it did the same. Restarted it, it worked on this try but then the monitor just went black as though there was no connection. Pressed the reset button and on this next attempt it came on but for some reason all my antivirus (NOD32) said that even though it was enabled, all of the modules failed to load. I disabled and re-enabled and it seemed to work. Ran a scan and all seems ok, then ran Windows Defender and no problems so continued using it as normal.

Then today, when I turned it on, it sounded like the hdd was making a fast clicking sound for about 3 seconds then when the computer loaded, it asked me where I want to boot from. I chose the correct hdd and got to the logon screen and it crashed. Restarted and it did the clicking again and asked me where to boot from again. It then worked and 10 minutes ago I was using using it and it crashed randomly again then crashed again..but what seems to happen is that it's still running (I had music on and it kept looping about 2 seconds of the song) but the monitor has no signal, because the light is orange which means there's no connection (it's green when the computer is on).

And just as I wrote that, it did the crash/black screen thing again! I will do a format and since I'm still running XP will upgrade to 7 at the same time, but I was wondering if the hdd could also be on it's last legs? After all, it is 6 years old (it's a Samsung) so do the things above sound like a hdd dieing?

If you've got this far, thanks for reading!

[blueball]

It could be the disk. Try the Samsung Tools to see if it can identify a problem. It could just be some corruption of files.

There is also ESTools from Samsung, you could always try both.

[smargh]

I'd expect a 6 year old PC to have more likely to have a failing power supply than a dodgy hard drive. Or, perhaps, a failing power supply causing other components like the HDD to fail. Either way, it need a good blast with a can of air and testing of each compent separately with a different known-good PC.