Urgent!!! Recieving a hard drive failure message

S

skewedview

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This morning I recieved an impending hard drive failure message while rebooting my machine. It provided to options F1 for booting and (F10?) for set up.

I'm assuming this is pretty important. Any thoughts on how I should proceed? I am running Win XP Home with 512mb Ram and 2 hard drives with multiple partitions all of which are NTFS. The machine is a year old Compaq.

I was unsuccessful at making a Ghost image of the primary partition this AM as a potential backup of current install, for what its worth.

Thanx

Skewedview
 
I would say got get a new hard drive b4 it goes completely out, unless there isn't anything of REAL importence on it. If thats the case just use it tell its gone and buy a new one at that point in time.
 
don't buy a new one make compaq replace it.

cool.gif
 
why the hell did a hard disk just die? thats so crap! PC hardware are so fragile.. you could just wake up one day and your graphics card has gone bananas for no apparent reason! Why God, why? I payed money for this sh!t! "Go buy a new one"... thats easy to say.. why? Why?!!


:mad: :p$$ed off:
 
Originally posted by Leo154
why the hell did a hard disk just die? thats so crap! PC hardware are so fragile.. you could just wake up one day and your graphics card has gone bananas for no apparent reason! Why God, why? I payed money for this sh!t! "Go buy a new one"... thats easy to say.. why? Why?!!
Because there is a balance in everything you manufacture. Quality vs. Quantity/Speed vs. Price. Right now the computer market is very biased towards Quantity/Speed and Price. Quality is left behind in the name of progress.

Not that that's a comfort when the piece of sh*t crashes....
 
Thanks all for your replies - Looks like I may have a new project for the week. Now any recommends on who to use for a replacement HD? Also are there any preventative measures I might take to prevent something like this happening in another year?

Skewedview
 
Well, the one good thing to do for preventative maintentance is something you have already done. Judging by the error message in your first post, I can assume you have SMART enabled in the BIOS (or the PC came that way). Aside from that, it can be hard to know when a HD will go bad. Some die slowly, other die in a blaze of glory.

I would get a new HD, format, install Windows, and then put your old drive as slave. It may not boot, but it might have enough integrity to copy any files you might want to save. After you retrieve any files (if possible) try to get a new drive under warranty. Older drives had 3 year warranties, but I've heard newer ones are cutting that time down. You'll have to check for your specific drive.

As far as what drive to get: One person will say brandX is the best while someone else will say that brandX sucks. All drive makers make occasional lemons (like cars), but most are solid. Anything from WesternDigital, Maxtor, IBM, Seagate, etc. should work fine for you.

While you are at it, you might want to pick up another smaller, cheaper drive and use it to make occasional images of your main drive. That way, if something like this happens again, at least you'll have a backup to restore.
 
Heat can seriously degrade HDD life. Make sure that you dont have your drives right on top of each other, otherwise they will probably reach extreme temperatures and subsequently only last a couple of years. Touch the side of you hard drive when its running and make sure that it is only luke warm and not scolding hot. I have had 2 drives die on me from heat.
 

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