Hy guys.

I have a bit of an annoying prob myself for once atm.

What could cause an HD to shutdown during bootup , and also during installation of windows , but seem to be in perfect condition other that that?
Im not 100% sure if it is the HD though , its difficult to hear where it comes from but you clearly hear something shutting down and then winding down for a second or so , im pretty sure its the HD.

In the morning on first boot the HD seems to shutdown everytime just after the windows loading screen and before windows actually comes on , it just stays there with nothing but an unmovable cursor , the rest of the pc seems to keep running normal. And sofar it happends only on first boot , if i hit the reset then it boots normally.

And it also happens during installation of windows , at first thats only where it happend when i was trying out lite versions of windows that i made but it happends at bootup now aswell. So that is a different partition but on the same HD.
It shutsdown at just after it is finished loading files everytime , just before the actuall installation begins.

All disk/health checks indicate no problems at all , and i dont seem to have any problems at any other times then when booting or installing at all with the HD. No strange sounds other then the shutting down sound either , wich sounds just like part of the sound(s) when i turn off the pc normally.
No temperture or voltage problems either.

Anyone know what could cause this?

Or incase it is not the HD , something else that you can clearly hear shutting down and make a sort of winding down sound sound for a second. Ive had my head almost inside my pc but i cant figure out where the sound comes from..

Hey there joe5,

This sound could only be one of two things, either the hard drive or the cd-rom drive.
You can try unplugging the CD-ROM and see if you still hear the noise but in all honesty with the other problems you are having I would have to say that I think your hard drive is on the way out.

I know you have said that you have run some programs to check the drive health but those tests normally check the physical health (e.g bad sectors) it can't actually check the inferface/power side of the drive.

I have experienced problems like this with hard drives before and after installing a new hard drive I have had no problems.

You could try changing IDE cables and the power connector that plugs into the hard drive, if that doesn't solve anything then I suggest trying another hard drive in your machine and see how it performs.

Hya Zim.

I havent tried changing IDE and power yet , ill give that a try after ive gone trough the new posts here.

I hope its not dying though , cant say im rolling in cash atm..

Switching cables around hasn't helped sofar , i'll try it with an old 40gb HD later but i'll have to empty it first. That HD has a prob with overheating when used for anything else then backup only , so i can only use it for a quick test or it will give new problems probebly...

But hopefully long enough to see if it is indeed the HD where that sound comes from. Im still not sure about that part.
It is also not really a "turning" sound (the "winding down") but more "powering down" somehow.

This is what makes me think that the problem may be related to the hard drives interface board and not the actual inside of the drive.

Let us know what happens when you test the other drive

Sounds like a power management setting perhaps,
Check what your settings are in the Control Panel, Display, Screen Saver, Advanced, turn these all to NONE and see if this fixes the problem.
hope this helps, this message was intended for Windows XP.