Is my HDD sick or dying?

[SkScotchegg]

When on the desktop and moving windows around and problems the frame rate is messed in and it jerks like hell. And when I run a game it says error "Please make sure you have directx 8.1 or higher installed and that your grapgics card meets the requierments". And it did this yesterday and I reinstalled dirextx and my graphics drivers and after that everything was fine. But now after a day of being fine it's doing the same thing again and my cousin says this happened to him ages ago when his hard drive died.

So is there a program I can use to check or anything else? Can you let me know what you think because I dont really know where to go from here.

P.S. I just tried all my other games and nothing is working. THey're all saying I need directx 9.0 or higher.

Oh and my spec:

Motherboard: Motherboard: Asus K8V SE Deluxe Socket 754
CPU: AMD-64 @ 3000+
RAM: Geil PC3200 400MHZ 1GB
HDD: 2x120gig Dimond Max 9 Plus 10MB Cache 7200RPM + 1 x 250gig Maxtor
Graphics: Saphire Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB
Sound: Audigy 2 Platinum X 6.1 24bit & SDB
NIC: 1x 3com 10/100mbit Lan
DVD-RW: Pioneer 106 - 4x
DVD-R: Pioneer 16x
CD-RW: 32x / 16x / 12x
Case: Case: Nokia ATX Cold Cathode Neaon Lights

I am using the 250gig maxtor as my primary with my games installed into that and it's also partitioned.

Cheers in advance,


SkScotchegg

 

[luminous]

I`d backup everything you can at present.
Is maxtor old? been defragged recently?(strange things happen as well as slow performance with a bad fragged drive).
You could uninstall your gfx drivers and use driver cleaner pro to completely get rid of them,and then install again.
If same trouble,could try a spare gfx card to see if you have same symptoms(and also clean and reseat your 9800 too).

 

[MAllen]

First - go and look in Event Viewer. (Right click "My Computer", Select "Manage" from the menu, Select "Event Viewer" from the management console)

Look through the errors logged by Event Viewer. If your hard disk is causing these lock-ups you describe, you will find errors in there.

Maxtor - yuk. Cheap and nasty drives that get very hot. Try installing Speedfan - http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php

This little proggy is mainly for checking tempatures of the motherboard, etc. But it also has some useful bits for checking the state of your hard disks. It lists the SMART info from the drive, and then nips off and looks up these details on the servers. This returns a report on the state of the drive, based on the SMART info. I have only used this on a few drives, but so far it has correctly ID the "cooked" drives I have handed it. Worth a check

(Funnily enough I was using this program at the weekend on a Dell system with a Maxtor SATA disk in. It had just about cooked itself to death, and it was barely two years old!!)

BACKUP NOW in case this drive suddenly fails on ya...