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 Help! Hard drive failure
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Anthony45654




PostPosted: Sat May 26, 2012 6:02 pm   Post subject: Help! Hard drive failure

Before I start, I would like to point out that this is the hard drive that came with the computer; it's over 5 years old. Also, there is lots of space left on my hard drive, over 120GB. The disk name is SAMSUNG HD501LJ and this is a screenshot of my hard drive specs (from Speccy v1.16.317):
Posted Image, might have been reduced in size. Click Image to view fullscreen.

Now here's what happened. I turned on my computer this morning and I got a black screen on start-up saying something along the lines of "Hard drive failure is imminent. Press F10 to repair and F11 to continue." I'm sorry I can't remember but it was something like that. So I pressed F10 and it just sent me to a list of my drives (only 1) and I wasn't really able to do anything; it was pointless. I exited and computer was starting up normally. A few minutes after the start-up was finished loading, I got this:
Posted Image, might have been reduced in size. Click Image to view fullscreen.

At this point I was like "shit...". My computer hasn't acted up since this morning but I keep getting that same warning pop-up every 20 minutes or so. Unfortunately I don't have anything to backup my files to. My guess is I'll have to buy an external hard drive then transfer all the files over and then either repair or replace my current hard drive then transfer the files back?

I'm not quite sure what I should do at this point. Should I get a computer technician to check my hard drive or should I handle it on my own and just buy the external hard drive? One last thing, does it matter what kind of external hard drive I get (aside from capacity)?
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mirhagk




PostPosted: Sat May 26, 2012 9:19 pm   Post subject: RE:Help! Hard drive failure

What you can (and possibly should) do is buy a hard drive, and an external case/cord. Then you can clone your existing hard drive to the new one, put the new one in your computer, and either throw out the old one, or use it as an external, unreliable storage.

I think what's causing the error (based on the error messages and the lifespan of the hard drive) is that windows is encountering errors writing to sectors of the hard drive. That means that the hard drive is close to the end of it's lifespan, but doesn't make it completely useless. I could be wrong though.

If your taking my suggestion of replacing your hard drive with a new one, you can do it yourself if you have some computer know how. You need to buy a harddrive that has the same connection (SATA or IDE), same size (so it fits) and one that has enough space/speed for what you need. You'll need to know how to swap out hard drives (quite easy, but can be intimidating if you've never done anything with hardware before) and how to clone a harddrive (I'd suggest using a linux live CD to do it).

If you didn't understand a word of the last paragraph, find a friend/family member who knows a lot about computers (and doesn't mind being bugged), or get a computer tech to do it. It's a fairly simply process, requires little effort by the technician and requires buying only a hard drive (and possibly an external storage bay if they don't already have one). Make sure you know this before you hire someone who says something else, and charges ridiculous amounts.
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