Could my D drive be at risking of dying?

Heh heh heh.

Anyway, more information is needed here. What kind of drive is your D drive? If it's a optical drive, you probably don't have a lot to worry about. If it's a hard drive or a partition of a hard drive, I'd back up the data just in case. Though if your drive came back and is operating normally (seems to load the same, no strange noises), it's probably fine.

 

When you have more than one hard drive, and one of them fails to spin up upon booting for example it can cause a drive to not appear to the operating system or the computer, it might even go unnoticed to the user if the operating system is on a different hard drive that is perfectly okay. Not all drives make strange noises that are noticeable easily, when something is wrong mechanically. Logic board problems would make no strange noises.

Faulty or corrupt partitions, failing logic boards, loose connections, system configuration problems to name a few. A lot of things can cause a hard drive to become invisible to the user even if it's running correctly.

If you were getting weird messages before the Windows logo showed up, you likely have a failing drive. It's possible for a system BIOS to check the SMART status of your hard drive during a boot and alert you to a problem. My motherboard does support this feature.

I strongly encourage a back up as soon as possible as long as your drive isn't making the click of death (in that case, don't even use it, take it to data recovery center before extensive damage occurs), you should take an opportunity to move stuff to a safe spot.

Back up should always be proactive, frequent, very thorough and well organized. Never reactive. The former offers some protection against surprise system failure, the later is if you're lucky at all to even still access the system should it begin to fail gradually rather than suddenly and completely. Now if you want to guard against fire, theft, or some other natural disasters things get more complicated as you have one back up on site and another off site. If it don't exist in three places at least, it never existed at all.

 

Download CrystalDiskInfo and use it to check your HD status. If it's reading "Warning" or worse you're gonna need to find some way to back it up or replace it entirely.

 

Check what the drive's SMART data says: https://hddguardian.codeplex.com/. Note that these indicators are not perfect, in that it may fail to detect a drive is dying; but if they say your drive is dying, you better believe it.

 

I recommend multiple external solid state storage devices or multiple large capacity flash drives in that case. Something that is large enough capacity that could be divided across without any issues is fine. Write protection is something to consider and so is duplicated 2 or 3 times in case of individual device failure or malware attacks. Burnable media may work but it have to be something like Blu-ray discs in that case to even be useful and not look like a hoarder's house.

Back up stuff you know you either have a hard time replacing or cannot replace at all. Should cut the size a bit.

I have a single 1 TB hard drive and only use 200 GB of it. Only 50 to 60GB, I bother to back up (the other 150 GB is stuff that is easily reinstalled or re-downloaded again with great ease). I keep tabs on everything to see if a developer still supports an application or not and if it was ever any use to me. I concern myself with the personal stuff as being the most important to me. Like all things it slowly gets bigger over time.

 

If your D drive is on the verge of dying, you may want to back it up.


But if it's close to death, then I suggest on following these steps from the link below after you get a new hard drive installed on your computer with a fresh OS installed.

http://lifehacker.com/5515337/save-a-failed-hard-drive-in-your-freezer-redux

 

It is possible that a failing power supply can actually damage components in a computer and leave residual effects from it or the caps go bad prematurely for some reason, resulting in system stability issues. If the power supply is the wrong one for your system you can have issues with stability, especially with more demanding tasks including strange problems that look like another component is going bad. Power supplies lose load capacity over time and can't handle as big as loads as they age. They can also be defective and might not show defectiveness right away.

The other thing I can think of that it may be time for a reinstall of the operating system. That may cure slow computer problems and stability issues. If your hard disk functions like normal afterwards then it's the cause of your issues. It's worth trying if you don't want to spend money on a new computer as they may make things function like it's new and out of the box again. It will not fix any hardware problems. However if you truly have an issue with your hardware, it's very possible it will certainly make things even worse as you may never make it pass the very stressful task for any computer (installing an operating system), thus you have no computer that does anything except power on passed the BIOS screen which is worse than a computer that barely works or runs slow if you ask me. I recommend stress testing your hardware to see if it there any issues before doing this task in this kind of situation. There is no sure fire to know if this would work. If the computer is only 1 or 2 years old this will save you some money to save up for a new one later on, but if it's 5 or more years this may not be worth the time and effort involved.

Improper BIOS settings can result in a slow computer or stability issues. You really have to be messing around and changing a bunch of stuff to cause this to happen.

Not all failing drives will show a bad SMART status.

Crystal Disk does install adware (don't go next and next) and avoid the OpenCandy versions (ads). Conduit Search can hijack your home page if you let the installer actually install it (uncheck this during install). It's not surprising anti-virus would freak out. I really have no idea why this application is like that. It's why I rarely recommend it to anyone.

 

An electrician might help with the electrical problems, if problems are affecting your home and not anybody else's.

If you can purchase a proper battery back up system, it can reduce damage or stress on future computers (they can get expensive fast the more power you need to keep the computer and monitor from shutting off quickly and the longer the run time, some of them get up on demands on building's electrical system itself). Output power should be enough to keep a system on to safely shut it down (about 10 or 20 minutes) and input power shouldn't exceed the limits of what the electrical system in the building can safely provide for the electrical circuit you're using. This may help if you have poor utility power in your area for computers in the future.

5 years is a decent life span for a computer. I had a computer last 7 years under heavy use (by then it was really showing how dated it was).