Hard drive failing

[Rich]

Just got the dreaded windows message "windows detected a hard disk problem..." Used a HD diagnostic and indeed it did say part of the drive was failing. Computer still seems to be running fine and there is no noticeable noise coming from the HD. In the morning I'm gonna run to Microcenter and grab an external HD to create a system image to it.

Question is this, for those of you who have experienced this, just how long has the HD held on after getting that warning?

 

[Man Called X]

I've actually never gotten that message . Every time I've had a hard drive fail, the comp would freeze up, bring me to a loading screen and tell me it was preparing security options or something. I ran at least one hard drive for 3 months after it started

 

[Snarly]

I've actually never gotten that message . Every time I've had a hard drive fail, the comp would freeze up, bring me to a loading screen and tell me it was preparing security options or something. I ran at least one hard drive for 3 months after it started

This. Mine started making ticking noises would freeze and sometimes bring up a random program or screen. Maybe some hard drives are different, Hopefully for you it is a false alarm but at least it is not the motherboard going down.

 

[AuxiliaryPie]

Back your shit up ASAP

 

[Kyrieville]

I agree with Aux, if you have anything of importance on that drive, get a new one today.

 

[Rich]

Well the interesting thing is there have been no real signs of trouble. No noises. No freezes. But ive ran a couple of different diagnostics and theyve all told me that its failing. When i boot up the bios screens flat says the HD is bad. Generally the S.M.A.R.T tests are reliable on this. Im backing up to an external hd now.

 

[Rich]

Well I've tried 3 times now to create a system image on my external HD and it's failed every time, but at different points. Gonna try one more time and then give up.

If all else fails, I still have my windows key and my office key, and that's really the big deal for me, avoiding having to pay the exorbitant costs for that shit again.

 

[AuxiliaryPie]

Well I've tried 3 times now to create a system image on my external HD and it's failed every time, but at different points. Gonna try one more time and then give up.

If all else fails, I still have my windows key and my office key, and that's really the big deal for me, avoiding having to pay the exorbitant costs for that shit again.

just make sure you back up your pictures, documents, games, gamesaves, videos, and possibly your downloads folder if you wish. making an image isnt really necessary, in fact you'll be better off with a fresh install of windows anyways. but back that stuff up asap cuz a drive can fail whenever it feels like it, unfortunately

 

[gourimoko]

Rich,

Your drive has already failed. The SMART message (the message you get from Windows) happens only when the drive has sufficiently failed (run out of reserve sectors) and now data loss has occurred already.

Your system is operating now simply by chance. There are millions of sectors on the disk, and they are slowly, but surely becoming corrupt one by one, and this has been happening long before you got the error (the disk has reserve sectors to mitigate the problem, but those have all since been used).

Your only solution is to buy another drive, perform a shadow copy and disk image clone of the drive (allowing for errors) and then moving the data from one disk to the other.

If that fails (and it does if the NTFS MFT is corrupted), then you'll need to use other tools like Clonezilla to do a disk image from outside of Windows. This is easy.

If your comfortable with Linux or Mac OS X you can remove your hard drive, attach it to another computer and run the following command to backup the disk.

dd if=/dev/sdb (your disk) of=~/mybackup.img bs=32MB conv=sync,noerror

If you want something a bit more comprehensive use ddrescue, it always works. You will have lost data, but depending upon how clone your drive will determine how much of that data you can recover.

 

[Rich]

Yea the disc has failed, but is still functional at the moment.

As for data transfer, nothing is working at the moment. Couldn't make a Windows installation disc from downloading ISO files because anytime I would try to actually move the files to a USB drive the comp would freeze. Same thing happening when I'd try to create a system image on an external HD. It would work for a while, but inevitably at some point during the imaging, it would die. That includes using either the windows program or a third-party program (such as Macrium).

I'll give Clonezilla a try.

 

[Rich]

Yea, so it died today. I did manage to clone my drive using clonezilla, so thanks for that Gouri.