Hard Drive Failure?
May 13, 2008
I purchased a HP Media Center PC approx 16 months ago. Shortly after I purchased it I started getting what appeared to be an intermittent hard disk error - the screen would suddenly go black, system would attempt to reboot and I would get a message in the lines of "SMART FAILURE predicted... Windows detected a hard disk problem... Immediately back up your data and replace your hard disk drive. A failure may be imminent." Then it gives some options to to go to the BIOS or to continue. Sometimes I can reboot immediately (usually reboots to safe mode first, then will reboot normal), other times I need to reattempt several times before it will actually reboot (the SMART FAILURE screen pops up each reattempt). Once I am able to reboot it's pretty unpredicatable when this screen will show up again...
sometimes a day or so later, other times it would be stable for a few weeks.... the reason I was able to 'test' for a while is 1.... after the problem occurs I backed up and removed all important data from the drive and 2... since the computer was
only a few months old HP was sending me a replacement warranty drive. Once I recieved the replacement drive I created an image of the original drive, copied it to the new drive and sent the 'faulty' drive back to HP. I assumed everything was fine, but the problem started occuring about 4 months later. So again, I made sure everything was backed up, created an image & contacted HP for another warranty drive. Once again, everything worked fine... for a while. Now, one year later out of the blue this 'hard drive failure is imminent' problem is popping up again...........
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Mar 8, 2009
The main hard drive on my pc that has the operating system on and everything is begining to fail and i need to sort it out before i cant use the disk anymore. The disk is in warrenty so i will be able to get it replaced but not all the things on it.
How can i backup my operating system and all of the programs and files on it, i have another hard drive that i can use as a backup but im not sure how to do it.
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Aug 14, 2009
1. Put computer to sleep. (iffy - sometimes resets resolution, 1-2 times caused harmless BSOD)
2. On wake up, computer shows distorted image and then BSODs.
3. resets to bios, but doesn't complete the bios progressbar (not sure if this is for POST)
4. Hard Drive(s) start to click.
I may be wrong, but seems like a simple case of hard drive failure, but it was directly caused by Vista, which has been known to have problems with Sleep. I don't remember checking/signing any Vista-hardware liability waiver, so is Microsoft liable for the hard drive failure since the risk was not eliminated by a critical update?
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Apr 20, 2008
I am trying to back up to a WD Passport 250gb usb drive. Every time it fails stating file 0x80070002 cant be found. I returned the drive to the store and replaced it, but I still get the same failure. Could I have gotten 2 bad drives or is there something I can do/chnge in Vista to correct this?
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Jul 30, 2008
went to get a new laptop and founds a nice mew Toshiba laptop (have to check model number) got the laptop home an started up fine worked fine also got thee system online and with all the anti virus set up (used the 90 day Norton trial) worked fine next day I stared the laptop up and the worked fine for a wile then went into a full crash with nothing responding forced a reboot look fine bios came up vista went to load the bar stuck and then restarted then kept doing this and no hard drive activity left the machine
and still stayed like this tried restore and start-up recovery as the pc was loading in safe mode the laptop did start the reload of the hard drive after that said was successful rebooted and did not want to load up ,took the pc back and checked the machine out they could not fix there machine the man told me the machine was not going to work and sated to fill out a Toshiba doa form stating that hard drive failure was the cause, that left me the option to change the laptop or get my money back and chose the get money back to see what i could get else were still looking I am thinking of getting a Sony vairo instead
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Nov 7, 2008
I have 2 hard disk drives: Seagate 1000GB 7200.11 32MB Western Digital 150GB 10KRPM 16MB and two days ago, the Seagate hard drive isnt being recognized/seen by the computer. I have an Asus P5Q3 Deluxe mother board. A week before this problem I was getting alot of BSOD's and freezes, turned out to be faulty RAM, but added this in case it might help. I have never had this problem before... I unplugged and replugged the hard drive, and switched a cord that links it to the motherboard. I have also tried putting the cord into a different SATA port but it didnt work, I didnt try a diff power cord yet, but I will see if it works or not and post it PS - I'm not very computer technical or w/e, but
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Mar 24, 2010
Think my HD may be failing. First, a few black screens have occurred on bootup. After normal shut down this A.M., it booted into the BIOS screen, after noisy boot. I simultaneously pressed Ctrl + Alt + Del expecting to get Task Manager. Got Advanced Options Menu. Pressed enter, booted to Windows normally. And just now, got louder than usual "whirring" noise on bootup, which went on to boot into Windows normally.
Question is: What would my options be if the Drive totally fails? I've got Personal Data saved. And all I have is Recovery Disks for this laptop. Would those be able to be installed on a new Drive if needed. I'm under the impression that I have a Smart Drive. Wouldn't that warn me if the Drive was failing? No warnings yet! And what type of Warning should I look for? So, how should I prepare for HD failure?
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Feb 10, 2009
The Hard Drive LED light on my Sony Vaio keeps blinking EVERY SECOND. When it's really quiet I can hear it too, it's constantly writing. Constantly. I did my research - read all the threads on the net and so far I have disabled:
Windows index
Windows defender
Windows search
Superfetch
System Restore
Readyboost
Defragmenter
I have uninstalled google desktop.
The system is totally virus and spyware free, and the anti-virus is not scanning (schedule scan disabled). All Vista updates are installed. Nothing has helped. I've run out of things to disable. I'm running Vista Business SP1, Dual Core 2.2 Ghz, 3 Gb RAM.
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Jul 29, 2009
I have a ASUS laptop running Vista Home Premium, 64 bit OS. I have several programs that I use but no loner have the insall disks for. Should I have to reformat in the future I would hate to lose them. Here's what I'm thinking: Buy a extrenal hard drive. Seagate, 1Tbit, usb, cost $90.00. Copy my hard drive to it. If I need to reformat. Reinstall Vista from my recover disk that came with the computer. Then copy files from external drive. Bingo. All my old programs would be there and working. Question is: Can this be done?
What file/folders do I need to copy to the external drive?
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Mar 26, 2008
I have built a new system to game with and have 2 new hard drives, on one I put XP Pro and then on the other I loaded Vista. I have more or less completed all the driver upgrades and windows updates but I keep getting repeated boot failures of Vista. I can always get into Safe mode but in Normal mode the boot fails just after the first spash screen at the point when the screen goes blank to be replaced by the small circular
Vista logo. After 2 or 3 attempts it succeeds to load but then the problem seems to reoccur, particularly when I have been back to XP for a while. I had a similar problem with XP but that seems to have sorted itself out. I have tired looking in the logs for faults and failures but no clues there.
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Mar 3, 2009
How do I stop Vista from chewing on my disks. I have had a failure of my C: hard disk and i want to stop Vista from chewing on my disk. Had to replace it and reinstall everything
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May 27, 2008
Is it possible to copy my entire hard drive onto an external hard drive. Vista Premium, all the data, etc. and what would be a good software to accomplish this?
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Sep 27, 2008
I have an external hard drive, I reformated it so I could use Vista's backup.Now it seems that when my brother inlaw tries to put some music files(Itunes) that the hard disc is unavailable to his computer. At this stage it seems that Vista has conned me into destroying a perfectly good WD harddrive!I have created a second partion on the hard drive and I am reformatting that, as I write this, but the only formatting option seems to be this NTFS, and that is what I had already formatted the ExtHD to so I think this formatting will be to no avail!From what I can figure I need to format into FAT but I tried a quick format an ex-fat option was there, but the problem was the same. I am becoming more frustrated with Vista, seems I just keep running into things that should be simple and aren't!
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Mar 23, 2008
when booting up from a vista cd I accidentally had my usb external hard drive plugged in and the drive has been emptied and replaced by windows there are sintimental photos etc on the drive can anyone help me to restore them
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Jul 2, 2008
Does 'Local Disc' D mean it is a drive inside my machine or could it be my external hard drive?
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Apr 17, 2008
I was wonder if anyone know a solution for the following problem. I have a ethernet hard drive and I've never had a problem until using vista and windows server 2008. both operating systems are unable to browse the drive, instead it completely crashes explorer.exe. Windows server 2003 & XP have never had trouble.
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Jun 16, 2009
Well i am going to backup my C Drive incase my PC encounter failure one day. How should i do it? I cannot find the topic that teaches you how to backup anymore..
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May 18, 2009
i bought a kit for an old hard drive. i got it to work once ealier today, and now it doesn't work. when i plug it into the usb, it will not successfully install. the kit is a rocketfish hd 35, the hard drive is seagate u8 model st313021a. the "remove hardware" icon appears in the tray, but no designated lettered drive appears on the computer.
the hard drive was part of an older tower that i couldn't get to boot. it's strange because just today i accessed the hard drive and located old pictures, music and other files that i hadn't seen in a few years. had i known this would have happened i would have started saving right away. i thought i had it working.
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Jun 3, 2008
First, my appologies: I tried a HW group first with this question with no response. I know some folks here are knowledable about Promise RAID. I should have x-posted instead of multi-posting, but I thought I'd get an answer in the other group.Anyway...I have a mirrored setup on a Promise RAID built-in controller. One disk wentbad. I removed it. The remaining disk continues to operate normally - fornow. However, I get a "critical" warning from the RAID controller every time I boot - but it does succeed without issues.
I would like to eliminate this warning and continue with only one disk.Preferably in a single-disk non-RAID config. But, whatever.How can I do that? Do I have to rebuild from scratch? What happens if I use [ctrl-F] to enter the RAID management and simply "delete the array"? Will I be able to reconfigure to boot from that remaining disk or will it require to be rebuilt completely as a single IDE?
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Mar 26, 2008
I've upgraded my machine at some point in the last year, where I added a new 500GB drive and moved my C: partition across to it. The previous 250GB drive was left in for additional storage. Just recently (while upgrading my BIOS) I realised that my system was still booting from the 250GB drive even though Windows was on the other disk. There is a fair possibility in the not too distant future that I'll replace the 250GB disk with a larger disk, in which case I won't be able to boot. Is there a safe and reliable way to change it so that the system boots from the 500GB disk?
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Oct 6, 2009
I was starting my computer today (that has Vista), and during the start up process, a black screen came up stating that there was an error opening up my external hard drive and it was checking for errors. After it finally booted up, I went to open the hard drive files, and it was totally BLANK! I then restarted the computer, and still the hard drive is EMPTY! I had ALL my important files in there!
The ONLY thing that looks promising is that when I go to Start then to Computer, it shows the hard drive there, and it still shows that 43GB are free of 111GB of storage (same info shows by right clicking on it and going to Properties). Why would it show this if nothing is on the hard drive anymore? Is there ANYWAY to recover these files again you think???? I NEED those files!!!! Remember that the hard drive STILL PHYSICALLY WORKS. It's just that I cannot access the files on my pc at the time for some reason.......
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May 21, 2008
I just bought and installed a external hard drive. I am fairly knowlegable about computers but this is my first Ex. Hard drive and know very little about there use. So what I want to know is how to save my Family Tree Makers files to it. And once I do that how do I know for sure it is opening from my new drive and not my computer C: drive? I saved it to a DVD one time but when the time came when I needed it all that was there was a short cut but no files.
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Sep 8, 2009
I have Windows XP and Vista. I always go through "safely remove hardware" before pulling off USB drive on XP. However, I have been trying to do the same on Vista, it seems that I cannot do the same as XP. For instance, I plug in my USB on Vista and it appears as H drive on Vista, when I am ready to do "safely remove hardware", I don't see the device drive H is on the "Safely remove hardware" window, so I cannot stop the H drive. I am concerned about the Vista hardware.
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Apr 26, 2009
i have an older maxtor 250gb ide hard drive and i am trying to put it in my computer so i can reformat it and install vista ultimate, the thing is when i go to disk manager i can see the drve, feel the drive, but it wont let me initialize it or anything, it comes up as "the request could not be performed because of an I/O devise error, the disk was originally in my modded xbox and i could acces it with xp.
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Mar 23, 2008
I have a new pc with only 256MB of RAM- how hard is it to add memory? Also, how do I find out how many GB the hard drive is?
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Feb 14, 2009
I purchased a new hard drive and named it NEW-BACKUP. I did a exact disk copy from my old BACKUP drive. My wife uses the old drive now. I have renamed my new drive to BACKUP. I am doing complete system backup's pretty frequently. To verify that the backups are happening, I typed in the command "wbadmin get versions" and got a list of the backups. The disk name showed up as "NEW-BACKUP". "NEW-BACKUP" is the destination drive for the backup and renamed as "BACKUP.
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Oct 16, 2009
I just inserted a SD/MMC Card in my laptop, and it changed my external hard drive letter from F to G?, how can I change it back to F again?, as I had everything setup on the FRIVE, now nothing recognises it?
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Sep 20, 2009
i was on Internet earlier today when i noticed that the videos were already completed buferring, but the videos were lagging; and firefox was performing kind of slow. i decided to re-start my computer. after re-starting the computer the logon process took extremely long, then an error message appeared: logon process has failed to create the security options dialog. failure - security options. i waited for the desktop to appear, then re-started again. but the perofrmance of the logon is still extremely slow. any suggestions?
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Nov 22, 2008
I just installed a new hd WD500g sata to my box. Vista "sees" the new hd in device manager, but doesnt see it in "my computer. It is freshly installed and straight out of the bubble wrap,I was thinking gee, maybe it needs formatted...but i dont see that option anywhere...maybe im missing something.... i donno...first time i've run into this....usually the drives are "seen" right away.....
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Sep 29, 2008
What is the best way to add a partition to a hard drive in safe mode or in normal mode.
Thanks in advance.
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Mar 23, 2008
I recently bought a western digital 1TB hard drive which I had to reformat before I could use. Everything works good now, except for onething. Sometimes the computer doesn't want to restart while the new drive is plugged in. If I remove it from the USB port prior to restarting, it will restart just fine.
It shuts down and turns on without an issue. This only happens when I
restart the system with it plugged in.
So while it's not a big issue,it is an annoyance.
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