Trying to fix a friends pc here. Boot up is freezing at the point...'detecting IDE drives'. Hard drive is also making a slight clicking noise. I've taken out the memory, hard drive and graphics card then re-seated everything. I'm thinking that the hard drive is faulty, would anyone else agree?

thanks

 

Yep def sounds like it. Only one way to find out, put in another HDD, cheap as chips these days.

 

hope he has a good backup

 

Thanks for the replies.

If it was my pc I would replace the hard drive straight away but since it isn't, I think I'll check out the battery on the motherboard and maybe try and repair the problem via booting from the Windows XP disc.

 

You could also try setting up his hdd on another pc as a secondary disc. And repair and defrag it. Sometimes the disk gets so fragmented it wouldn't even load onto windows.

 

Look if the HDD is clicking on read access it's fooked period. Just change it No point messing about with anything else.

 

Going to replace it tomorrow, fed up with messing around, life's too short.