Hard drive lock-up

I got a problem here, decided to post it here to see what you guys think. About once a day my hard drive appears to just lock up, total freeze up of the system. It doesnt appear to be os related as far as I can tell, since the hard drive light stays on. And it happens very randomly, once uploading through FTP, once while browsing this site and at other times different apps where running so its not related to a bug in a certain apps. Only recent changes to my comp have been a BIOS update and an internal zip installed. Unplugged the zip and it still happens, so I think not related to that. Also we here in california have had brown-outs and such so im thinking maybe that messed with my drive. Anyhow my question is do you think it is my hard drive or mainboard or os? Im at a loss and may just buy a new hard drive and see if that cures the problem, but would rather not...

Do a full scandisk of your hard drive. And try defragmenting to see if that helps...

The first thing I would venture to say is that your BIOS flash didnt go too well. On freak occurences, flashing the bios has been known to cause the system to perform erratically or not at all. The zip drive itself should be causing any problems. I doubt there is a hardware confilct, as you would ahve detected it by now.

First thing you should do is go to right click on the 'my computer' icon and go to properties. Go to your hardware manager, click on the HardDrives tab, click on the drive that is causing you problems. Go to the properties section for that device. Make sure that in the bottom space, it does not say "MS DOS compatability mode". If it does, you
1) Have a virus and will need to scan your system.
2) Have an unseen conflict with some hardware device using IO settings for the HDD. Things like IRQ conflicts or memory addresses.
3) You need to upgrade the drivers for your IDE controller and HDD.
4) Your bios is hosed and you either have to recover it or buy a new mother board. If you bios was award, I believe you have the option of backing up your old bios before flashing the new to the cmoss. If not, then save up some cash.
5) It could be OS related. Windows has been known to cause its own problems with hardware and fry the controller cards on harddrives.

Before you do anything though. Try defragging. Then run scandisk. If all else fails, get the latest diagnostic software from your HDD's manufacturer and run them. If it finds errors, it will give you a code that you can use to warranty the drive. Brownouts and blackouts can cause the drive to write bad sectors. And when this happens, they multiply like rabbits and the drive is basically gone.

I regularly run scandisk and defrag, but its about due so ill try that first, then I may try flashing the bios again, IDE controller has latest drivers installed, um what else...

Could a hacker throw in a little evil something? The reason I ask this is that when I was browsing some links off of wastedyouth's site I got an html window saying I was being hacked, wasnt to concerned at the time (im on a LAN with first comp in the chain firewalled) but im no hacker genious so I dont know what they are capable of. I also rechecked the link and twice out of 10 tries the site that was pointed to would not come up and instead the little hack message would. Appears some one is riding on a link or something. BTW this was fairly recently and the timing works out for my prob. Whatcha think?

If you are concerned about being hacked I "strongly" suggest Blackice Defender. It's the best 30 bucks you'll ever spend

http://www.networkice.com

Although it won't do much good after the fact :(

hehe, yah, I installed that one at work, dont know what I got here, my brother takes care of it here. May have found the problem though, missing jumper! hehe, must have forgot to put it back on last time I had my drive on another comp as a slave, oops! Well, at least I hope that was the prob...

ZoneAlarm is free. :D

BlackIce isnt actually going to prevent anything. If you are in a chained firewall, you should be pretty safe. There are known exploits for blackice and zonealarm. The best thing is to not download any strange files and install them. people find it funny to put things such as backorifice and other "rootkit" type things on windows machines.