hard drive is on its way out?

Hi guys
I think my hard drive is on its way out.
When I start up my computer, I hear a spinning sound like a fan revving up.
Once it has booted up the spinning noise stops.
2 days ago I turned it on and nothing was happening. Black screen and the hard drive light was on, but nothing was happening. I turned the power off and on again and it was booting up with the spinning noise.
What do you think; new drive?
After it stopped 2 days ago I made a ghost image.

Sven

 

Sounds to me like either a motherboard controller or hard drive controller board problem. Is this black screen before or after BIOS?

 

Thanks to both of you. will try and check the drive.
I am not sure if the black screen was before the bios. I just turned it on and walked away. When I came back it was a black screen and the light was on.

Sven

 

I have 2 hard drives in my system, 1 is a wd and 1 is a Seagate.
I downloaded the diagnostics from WD and the dive checks out OK. It also shows the Seagate as failed. So I downloaded the tools from Seagate and it tells me it can not find any compatible drives. ??? I can access any and all files on that drive. I also run the WD test on the Seagate drive and it tells me the drive passes, but the SMART status failed.

I remember from the days when I was running Win98 that my 2nd drive was broken and it refused to boot from the 1 st drive.
Is that the same here?

Thanks
Sven

 

Possibly, depending on how your system is set up/if RAID is in place.

 

No RAID, just 2 harddrive 1 master 1 slave

Sven

 

Don't suppose any major boot files have ended up on the other drive? Mind you, it would usually say, unless the error message had gone by the time you got there.

 

Don't think so, it was working fine till about a month ago when that spinning sound started. the complete stop only happend once last week. today it booted up just fine with no spinning sound. just strange. I will be gone for the rest of the week, so if any one has an idea, please post it and i get it on friday.
Thanks
Sven