recently i was on my computer and i got a blue screen while running windows vista. i attempted to restart my computer but when i get to my bios screen it doesnt detect my C drive and says error loading operating system. i did another restart and checked my bios and my boot priority was changed. i used to have my hard drive as first, cd rom second, and floopy third. now it only says cd rom first and floppy second. i did a 3rd restart but this time it actually detected my hard drive and loaded up just fine. however when i'm just browsing around on the internet i noticed that sometimes my comp. would freeze quite frequently roughly every 15 mins or so anywhere from a few seconds up to a minute. a few hours later i got another blue screen and again my hard drive wasnt found. i boot up my computer and i hear an odd clicking sound. i hopped on my sister's comp and looked around the net and actually found a few websites that have audio files of common hard drive problems but none of them sound like mine.
some things i've tried are cleaning out my heat sink (which was very dirty) and i tried using different cords to connect my hard drive and neither works.
i dont quite consider myself a computer person but i do have limited knowledge of computers, common sense, and access to google. can anyone suggest some things that i could possibly do to fix my computer? or at least confirm my suspicions of hard drive failure?
some things i've tried are cleaning out my heat sink (which was very dirty) and i tried using different cords to connect my hard drive and neither works.
i dont quite consider myself a computer person but i do have limited knowledge of computers, common sense, and access to google. can anyone suggest some things that i could possibly do to fix my computer? or at least confirm my suspicions of hard drive failure?