Recently a friend of mine had problems with his Desktop PC and more general the PC got slower (Windows -7-, so this is not strange to me) and had some problems like stop responding from time to time.
The pc, has attached two internal disks one -possibly- damaged (but still under power) and one SSD with the windows 10 installed on it.
The hdd disk during these problems, was attached and had windows 7 too. When I went there and checked the pc, I found -initially- no problems, but didn’t checked the disks with some tool.
I installed as an alternative a Debian 10 XFCE distribution to the hdd and left it on power… but asked my friend to load that OS in case that will have problems with his (used on) windows.
I could not find out if this first problem was caused from some temperature issue on the GPU or a disk issue, or even a CPU temperature issue.
I left the pc to have as default disk the SSD and to boot on Debian only if user will decide it and boot (though bios) from the hdd (that had grub installed witch contains windows entry too).
The next day, my friend told me, that he had issues of non-responding system while he had loaded windows for just some minutes … Then he tried out debian (selected from bios) and had the same problem …
Initially, I thought that this means it is possibly a GPU problem because windows was installed on the ssd and could not stuck there because of just an hdd in power but not in use. (and also the problem was the same after just some minutes of usage in both disks and OSs).
The sure thing is that it is a hardware problem.
But could it be the damaged disk under power and not the gpu?
Should I just unplug the hdd and leave him to check for some more days?
Or I have to be sure it is not a disk problem?
PS: Sorry if the question is not good for here … feel free to ask me delete or to close it as of topic … But if you could help me find a way to make an unsafe diagnose (like excluding or not excluding the damaged disk as the reason of the problem) I would appreciate -if this can be on topic-.
Some tools too under windows or better under debian/linux that could help me test the hardware could be a nice acceptable answer.
My one sentece question is: Could an hdd under power but not under usage from the OS cause an un-respond-able OS independed of the OS?
