Imminent hard drive failure warning on boot!

[Briarius]

Anyone ever have this warning? I've run the Seagate on line diagnostic and it was pretty vague. Apparently one of the SMART drive diagnostic indicators is flagged, so that's why I've got the error. My real question is has anyone had this and how long did it take for the drive to die? The drive is a 75gig western digital that's about 4 years old.

[trotsky]

1. Replace the drive ASAP.

Oh it might be another year from failure. Or a day. Simply put, it's not worth the risk, and hard drives are inexpensive. You can use a software package like Norton Ghost to "clone" the drive onto the new one, the end result being you don't lose a bit of data nor do you have to reinstall all your programs. It's like your computer goes to sleep on the old drive, and wakes up on the new one.

[Briarius]

2. I've got all the important data backed up

on another HD. It's more a matter of limited cash at the moment. I've never ghosted a system, besides the win2K could use a fresh install and the linux side has very few things installed.

[McKenzie]

3. HDD's sometimes have a number on them usually

with the suffix "MTBF" (mean time before failure) but it's only a mean figure; drives can fail unexpectedly. Does the drive make grinding noises? If so it's dying. Backup using Norton Ghost or removeable media and replace it is my advice.

[RoyGBiv]

4. One other thing ...

Do you have SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) enabled? If so (that's what that warning looks like it came from), this thing can give false positives, at least false in the immediate sense. ("Imminent" sounds so scary, doesn't it? :-) Even a false positive does signify some sort of physical error or problem condition involving your hard disk that may or may not be a problem with the drive itself. If it's running too hot, for example, SMART can be set off to warn of imminent failure. The fix for that is not to replace the drive, but to cool your system before you have to replace the drive.

That said, a drive that is four years old probably needs to be replaced or at least relegated to backup status, and it probably does have physical errors that could begin to corrupt important data. When you have the cash available, I'd replace it. Then wipe it and run some diagnostics and repair program on it to see if you can find physical problems, repair or block them, and use it for some purpose.

Of course, as the original respondent said, it could die tomorrow no matter what. Hard drives can be irritating.

Oh, btw, Seagate's disk analysis program doesn't like Western Digital drives it seems. I've had it detect a flawed WD hard drive right out of the box that I still have running as a "miscellaneous" drive some three years after I got it. The Seagate the program came with died in a year. Go figure. :-)

[Briarius]

5. yea, the SMART is generating the error

I ran the Seagate utility because I thought it was one of their drives for some reason. Anyway, the wester digital diagnostic gives the same SMART error, so it seems legit. I'm not going to worry about it, all the important things are backed up. Thanks to everyone for the tips!