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Dead Hard Drive?

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  • 13-10-2007 11:45am
    #1
    still_raining
    Closed Accounts Posts: 50 ✭✭


    I booted up my PC last night only to be greeted by a POST error stating:

    Master Hard Disk:S.M.A.R.T. Status BAD, Backup and Replace
    Press F1 to continue

    I press F1, everything continues on fine, it boots into Windows and I start a virus scan in case that was the problem. When I returned to it a while later NOD32 had crashed, along with a few other services, and the whole system had slowed to a complete crawl. Eventually the whole thing just hung after I tried to shut it down.
    Now whenever I power up I get the same message as earlier followed by:

    A disk read error occurred
    Press Ctrl, Alt, Delete to restart

    My PC is pretty old (about 6 years) so I'm guessing the drive is dead?
    It definitely powers up and spins, and I can hear drive activity so I'm hoping my files can still be recovered. It's a 40GB Quantum Fireball Plus A5. Anyone know how I can recover my files or even fix it?


Comments

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    #2
    Ghost Train
    Registered Users Posts: 30,028 ✭✭✭✭Ghost Train


    you shouldn't have done a virus scan... because it's not a virus, it a dying hard disk

    running virus scan, just stresses out the drive more, which was only going to make it fail faster

    you would have been better off to try and rescue any important files as soon as you got the warning.

    i'd say it might be difficult to rescue your files, you could try putting it in a different machine and try read it from there. Programs like spinrite can try and fix drives to make them some what readable again


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    #3
    trout
    Registered Users Posts: 9,922 ✭✭✭trout


    still_raining wrote: »
    Anyone know how I can recover my files or even fix it?

    First ... Stop trying to boot from the drive, and do not run any AV scan or de-frags or anything else that will stress the drive. It is failing after all.

    Can you get access to an external hard drive caddy ?
    If you can, put your drive in the caddy.
    Hook the caddy up to another machine, and back up what data you can, before the drive fails completely.

    From what you've described, the disk is probably on it's very last legs ... best of luck!


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