New
#1
Is my HD failing, and if is, what should I do?
Hello
I keep the computer I am having the problem with turned On all the time during the week, turning it Off on Sunday night's, and restart's on Monday's. Last Thur., Dec. 3, when I went to wake it from Sleep mode, I found it was Off. I have it plugged into a battery backup system along with another computer. That computer was On and works fine. I have looked in Event Viewer, (E.V.), to see if there were any listings that may tell me why it went Off, but found nothing. Is this something that I should try to find the answer to, and if so, how would I do that? Or is it something that I could wait and see if it happen's again ?
When I restarted the PC, it opened to a black screen with white lettering, saying that Windows had not shutdown normally, and gave me several option's as to how I could proceed. I choose to Start Windows Normally. It took a very long time for it to open to the Desktop and than it was very slow to respond to any inputs from the mouse. It was very unstable. Some things worked and some would not.
I ran the Check Disk and System File Checker, (SFC), utilities. I have never ran them before so not sure how to interpret the result's. I do know that SFC said it found corrupt files and it fixed some of them but it could not fix them all. I ran SFC three times, always getting the same result's.
In E.V. there are hundred's of error's. One of the most predominant ones is iaStor, (The device,\Device\IDE\iaStor0, did not respond within the time out period). I went to Device Manager, opened the IDE Controller and it said it was working properly. I do not know if this is the device that error is referring to, but thought I would pass along this information in case it is. Also have a lot of Schannel error's.
Over the last couple of day's, the PC has really started to run much better. It seems to be just as fast as it was before, do not have very many freeze up's (IE would become unresponsive once in awhile), and some of the things it would not do before, it does them now. For instance it was not making System Restore Points, either on it's own or manually, but I made one today and it worked. I have not shut the PC down and restarted it to see how that goes, nor have I ran a full scan with MSE, to see if it would be able to scan the whole system and not freeze up someplace.
So what do you think. Are there any other things I can do to get more information for you that would help you see if I may have a HD starting to fail? If so, let me know and will try and get it for you if not to complicated.
I do have three Backup System Images that I made with the built in Windows Image maker from July, Sept, and Nov. Also have the System Repair disk and the System Recovery disks which consists of 5 DVD's.
If the HD that is in the PC now were to actually have bad sector's, and I tried to put the Nov. Backup Image on it, would they cause that to fail, or would they be overwritten and the re-image could possibly work? I would really like to get an answer to this question.
Or should I eliminate the doubt on the HD being good or bad, and just buy a new one and go from there? If I went this route, I would want to buy a better, (not a bigger one), HD, than what I currently have. It is a Western Digital, 1TB, 7200 RPM, SATA, 3.5 inch HD. It sells on Newegg for around $60.00. If you think this is the way I should go, what would you recommend in the $100 to $200 range?
Finally, I do realize that when it comes to computer's, there are no guarantee's that when you do some thing on a computer, it is always going to go the way you want it to go. Stuff happens.
I thank anyone who may respond to this post in advance.
LKW198