HD Failure Error Message ?

Robert11 · 26 May 2012

Hello,

Have a 3 yr old HP Desktop.
Seems to be working O.K.
It's on about 20 hours/day.

Have been receiving messages that Windows has detected a HD problem

Disc Name: ST 31000528 AS
Volume: C:\;D:\

I ran the HP Support Assistant and it comes back with the
Smart Threshold Test Failed. Error Code HD521-5W

Will certainly do a lot of backups now, but can anyone tell me anything about
what might be happening ? Again, PC seems to be working fine.

Anything I should be doing other than the backups, fixes, etc. ?

Any info. would be much appreciated.

Thanks,
Bob

TVeblen · 26 May 2012

It means that your hard drive is reporting errors. These are usually bad sectors, meaning the data can't be read and/or written to sections of the hard disk. An increasing number of bad sectors means the hard drive is probably malfunctioning.

You should probably be shopping for a new hard drive.

Some people have had success with getting additional life from older drives by wiping the drive (using a program that will write all 0's to the entire drive), and then reformatting and reinstalling everything back again.

But buying a new drive and cloning the old drive to the new is less work and a near gaurantee of success.

Two tests you can do to confirm reported problems:
Run Checkdisk from Windows: Disk Check
Download and burn a diagnostic CD from your hard drive manufacturer's website and run it.

Robert11 · 26 May 2012

Hello,

Thanks for help.

To clone from the old presumably now bad hd, to the new one, do I need some special software, or is included with most new hd's, or... ?

Or, is it part of windows 7 perhaps ?

Thanks again,
Bob

karlsnooks · 26 May 2012

Bob,
First carry out the advice given to you.

Then we can move forward on a solid basis.