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#1
Hard drive failure
I hope y'all don't mind if I piggy back onto this discussion because my computer has just generated the same error message. I followed Never Say Die's advice and d/l'd the HDDScan utility. Here are my attributes:
And the results from the short test, which at least were encouraging. I think.
I note that my drive appears to be having "Spin Retry Count" issues, and I wonder if the problem might be related to the drive's operating temperature. The computer's case has a thermometer and it's showing a relatively cool 78.7 degrees F. So, can you offer any comments? This popup is annoying. Even after I click on it to get rid of it, it pops up again a few minutes later, so I guess it isn't going away by itself. I don't suppose a little drop of machine oil on the drive's spindle would do any good would it? Come to think of it, I don't even know if the spindle's end is exposed.
I got a question -- will the windows warning popup indicate more than one partition if they're all part of the same drive? In this drive's case, the warning mentions the "C" partition, but the drive has three partitions. I guess it doesn't matter a whole lot.
Also, regarding the OP's worries about backing up his drive, I did this recently with my laptop. I bought a larger hard drive for it, and used a Linux .iso for this. The .iso included several utilities, including a cloning utility. It also came with Parted Magic, which I ended up having to use as part of the cloning process. The cloning utility did exactly what it said -- it duplicated the old drive onto the new, right down to the old drive's size. The rest of the space was unallocated. So I used Parted Magic to reclaim this space. Worked like a charm, but it just took a while. The cloning utility took about six hours from start to finish. Sorry, I don't know the name of this Linux utilities collection. I just wrote "Parted Magic and other utilities" onto my disk's sleeve. It's bootable, though, so you just have to make sure your DVD/CD drive is set to bootable and you're all set.
Last edited by Brink; 10 Oct 2012 at 21:34. Reason: move to new thread of it's own for better help