Hard Disk Problem

Diamond Geezer

Diamond Geezer

Gone But Not Forgotten
Joined
May 2, 2003
Messages
13,884
For a while now my seven year old pc has been poorly. I have problems booting up, originally I get a report telling me my hard disk is S.M.A.R.T enabled Status Bad, accompanied by a message telling me to back up my files and replace (Done)

At the next screen I am told to press F1 to proceed which used to let Windows (Home XP) load but now rarely does so. I have been leaving the pc powered on at night to try and get round this but overnight no matter what screensaver, power settings or moving web page I leave it on the pc freezes up which means of course I have no alternative but to boot up again and which is causing more and more problems.Unfortunately I do not have any boot up media, is it possible to create one ?

I have a utility called Tweak XP Pro which should let me try and repair bad sectors but when I try and access this I am told the hard disk is locked ( does this mean password protected ?) and chkdsk will run when I next start up which of course is the problem. Eventually last night I managed to get chkdsk to run but despite carrying out all five of its tasks iy did not cure any problems, indeed it advised me the hard disk may still be corrupted.

Does anyone know of a means of repairing bad sectors or know enough to advise any steps I could take ? Did a system restore just for the hell of it, didn't expect it to work and indeed it was unable to do one.

Just before Cheltenham too :ph34r:
 
DG - don't local shops hire out computers when they're being repaired - if indeed yours is saveable? All would not be lost that way.
 
Roger it don't look good mate, here's hoping you have not a lot of things that you want to keep but it looks as though a new hard disk is called for see below...

Your drive is failing. Don't worry about whether the drive appears
in device manager, your problem is way bigger than that.

1) Do whatever you can to get a backup of the contents and system state using MSBackup.

Do this NOW.

2) Reboot and disable SMART detection in the server's BIOS.

3) Get a new drive.

Do the above IMMEDIATELY. Do not wait if you value your data. The drive is almost certainly failing with what is called a "grown defect". This is a euphemism for saying that the recording surfaces of the drive are eating themselves alive. This can happen slowly or suddenly or slowly and then suddenly. There is no way to predict. But the SMART status is telling you that it is happening.

I would recommend for any server that you have two drives and a mirroring controller to avoid this kind of situation in the future, Roger hindsight is a good thing to have mate but I personally run two hard disk on my p-c or you could partition if buying only the one and have one as operating system and use the other one as a back up......... :suspect:
 
if the pc's 7 years old it might be worth looking at a new one, £200 will buy something that will seem like a rocket compared to what you have!
 
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