Hard drive light goes solid red and computer locks up...

Hi everyone

for the last 2 weeks or so my computer has been locking up and freezing with the data light on the computer to go into a solid state of red.

i thought i had fixed it by trying a few other solutions i had found here on the net such as....

1. re-applying thermal paste to CPU
2. removing build up of dust
3. checking ALL connections
4. Re-installing windows
5. checking hard drive for bad sectors (which it found and fixed)

im running...
windows 7 32bit
3gb RAM
ATI HD6870
1 320GB western digital HDD
1 500GB western digital HDD ( which i think is causing the problems but its only a year old and shouldnt be failing now).

so yeaa..thats my problem..reall starting to anger me and im considering building a completley new system but this ones only a year and a half old :/ any help from you guys would be much apriciated

Thanks
Daniel.

It does sound as though the hard drive has failed or is not far off it.

I may be wrong, but I think Western Digital have a five-year no-quibble guarantee on their hard drives so it'll pay you to check with them.

A hard drive can fail at any time so I think you've just been unlucky.

You should try and get any important data off the drive as soon as possible.

Given that you have two hard drives, I would try the following; try using them one by one and see which one really gives you trouble.

Another option is to use a LiveCD - booting from a disk with either Windwos or Linux LiveCD. This will tell you if your drives are really failing or there is some sort of software issue - and indexing can be one of them.

By the way, does this problem occur if you boot to the safe mode as well?

cwright111 said:

for the last 2 weeks or so my computer has been locking up and freezing with the data light on the computer to go into a solid state of red.

Explain please what you mean exactly by "locking up". If left to itself, does your PC remain in this state indefinitely? If it comes-out by itself, after what period of time? Can you do anything at all while it is locked-up? Do you have to reboot your PC to get it back, and how do you do that?

I've had similar issues to yours but the PC "comes-back" after a couple minutes.

Thanks guys ill try some of the suggested things and get back to you :)

Maxseven - as for the locking up thing i mean it completley locks..mouse doesent move.. CTRL ALT DEL does nothing..only thing i can do is hit the power button untill it shuts off. iv tried leaving it but the computer was still the same after half an hour :/


It was a lot worse before i searched and fixed bad sectors on the hard drive..and one point i couldnt even boot up past the windows logo..it halfway halfway in and then lock up!

Once, when I had a hard drive fail, I checked it with the defragger, and found an abnormally large area showing up as fragmented, and running a defrag didn't change it as expected. This would be just another quick check to throw in with the others.