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Dell Optiplex 745- HDD is dying only days after I bought it
I bought a refurbished Dell Optiplex 745 PC with XP Pro installed for cheap. Got it on the 6th, hooked it up on the 10th when I had a dedicated monitor, and began setting it up. Installed Super anti Spyware, a couple other minor programs, and some games, didn't take it online yet.
Now 2 days after I get it, I power down and get a BSOD on shutdown. Reboot, schedule chkdsk to run on restart, and it gets through the first 4 steps okay but hangs on step 5. Reboot, shut down, restart, now the desktop won't load. Restart into safe mode, try to run system restore... fails. It fails system restore 3 times.
I check event viewer and see a pile of errors, all suggesting bad blocks on the HDD. So great, just bought this, HDD is going bad. It started showing errors yesterday, but piled them up today. This is what HD Tune gave me. Almost 30% bad, running rather hot.
I have a backup HDD I can swap with- a WD 500 GB. This PC takes a SATA HDD so it'll be no problem to stick it in. That is, until I go through the process of a fresh XP install plus manually installing the Dell drivers in their proper order since I didn't get any recovery disks with this computer.
HOWEVER... while I can assume the HDD is old and going bad from age, could anything else have caused this? I don't want to stick in a new HDD and find it's dying after 2 days either. It apparently showed no errors for the refurbisher and may have even passed their own tests(event viewer shows nothing from when they worked on it), but it's bad now. ANY cause beyond the HDD being old and past its life cycle?