HDD problem, gigabyte's easy tune major problem and etc....

[MidnightMike]

Ok, about 2 months ago I was working on my pc while upgrading my cpu and mobo bios.
My PC had slowed down after the upgrades alot, and I needed to defrag and get rid of some some back door trojans that got inside my pc by accident, while defragging my 120gig sata hdd I had noticed that diskeeper kept on defragging on this hdd for about 4 hours, I had to force diskeeper to stop and it did.
A couple of days later, when ever I use my second hdd 120gig, it will make a very faint scratching noise if I am using it for way too long or copying data back and forth between my 80gig that has XP pro on it....
Is there anyway I can make system repairs to my hdd via through DOS or flash drive ? it is a seagate sata hdd and has never, ever caused me problems up till now....

I had upgraded my easy tune 5 suite to version 6.0 gigabyte has found out there is a very bad problem with that version, and the damn thing has corrupted on my pc and won't uninstall without the installation program.
I had it on my second hdd but had to wipe everything off of it including the installation package do to problems with my hdd, would anyone have a copy of easy tune 6 so I can get rid of the blasted thing ?

Also I have a legal version of vista ultimate that I got as a gift from my friend at work, however though I have no key for it he said he lost it, does microsoft sell legit key's for it ? if so how much do they cost ? and no I am not asking for warez or crackz.

[RabidDog]

Dklite is far better than mSoft defragger, and its not msoft, but free.. they hope you will like it enough to buy the full product.
Download easy tune 5 from Gigabyte website, But I dont think its much cop really.. a few extra fans on the northbridge would go a lot further..

[redwudz]

I had nothing but problems with Easy Tune 6 with Vista Premium. It would crash as soon as it was launched. I found a older copy of Easy Tune 5 and it runs perfect on Vista. No idea what the problem was, but it happened on both Vista machines. I use ET mostly to check temps and fan RPMs, and to fine tune the fan response profile. You can OC with it, but I don't recommend that except for testing. But, as mentioned, you can get most all versions of ET at the Gigabyte site.

If I recall, MS will charge you the full retail Vista price for a Vista key. If that's the case, it's cheaper to just buy a boxed version at a store.

I think I would back up my data from that HDD. How full was the drive? Defragging shouldn't take that long. Just from what was stated, my suspicion is your HDD is on the way out. It may have defragging problems because it's run out of replacement sectors. Bare minimum, I would repartition and reformat it and see if it still has problems. That's a lot faster than a defrag and more through.

[MidnightMike]

well the sata hdd had 3 partitions for it:
1.Data Program and file backup
2.Movie and video beta testing
3.Emergency backup of My documents and settings

Before I defragged with diskeeper 11.0 trial it had 70% of it's resources free mind you I got rid of movies that didn't need to be there or couldn't be backed up because I didn't enough DVD-R's to back them up and it was a total of 40gigs.

Is there a slight chance that I can save this hdd temporarily for now I am gathering the money now for a 300gig hdd from ebay brand new, the hdd is quiet most of the time I am going to try a technique of hdd maitenance first in dos with the seagate tool zero fill it slowly for about 4 hours straight and let cool off under my fan for a full day.
I know that some of you might find that strange but I managed to save a couple of hdd's from dying to soon and made them last for me and customers that are interested in buying.
I just need to know if it will save me temporarily.
Thats just how the way I operate as a technician or ex-technician I'll need to take the A+ exam again they have set new standards for old pc technicians which is something I'll have to get use to to work .

[redwudz]

No, not strange. I've managed to recover data from a hard drive by putting it in the freezer for a couple of hours. I could be completely wrong about your hard drive condition, but there seems to be some signs of failure. The noise for one, if it never occurred before. The long defrag time, especially if you have 70% free. If that size drive has three partitions, defragging should be fairly fast, assuming each partition is defragged separately.

Again, the drive itself may be fine. The problem could be within the partitions in software. Just from experience, the best way to test/fix this type of problem is to repartition/reformat and see if that fixes it all.

I'm not a fan of multiple partitions as they still all use the same controller and IDE channel. To me, it's more like a folder, but that's JMO.

If you had some serious malware attacks, they can sometimes damage the MBR (Master Boot Record) of the HDD. For that, I still favor a repartition, reformat and a fresh install of Windows to start with a clean slate.

But you can try some repair options. Just try to backup your data in case they fail.