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Author
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Topic: Computer hard disk crashing?
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 09-01-2006 04:12 AM
Firstly, is the BIOS saying this or the operating system? If it's the BIOS, I'd try noting all the settings, resetting it to factory defaults, putting back the ones you need and trying to reboot. It could be some sort of diagnostic program in the BIOS which is getting confused. I find that this sort of thing tends to happen as the battery which maintains the BIOS settings when the PC is disconnected from mains power starts to run down. If this does the trick, I'd change the battery.
If it doesn't, it does look like there's an HDD problem. In that case, the first thing I'd do is to backup all your vital data now, before doing anything else. In fact, I'd probably do that before investigating the BIOS. Then, if you don't want the hassle of reinstalling everything manually, I'd use an imaging utility such as Norton Ghost or (my preferred choice) Drive Image, and make a backup image of the system partition onto a set of DVDs.
You're now ready to replace the HDD. As Monte said, whether you can use a SATA drive or not depends on whether your motherboard has a SATA controller on it. If it does, a SATA drive probably will work a bit quicker. I'd kind of doubt it, though: my present motherboard is just over three years old, and at the time I got it, SATA controllers weren't a 'normal' feature: they were only found on the high end boards costing £70 plus.
If you do get a SATA drive, you'll have to install a special driver to get Windows to use it, which might give you problems reinstalling your image. On mine, it was a case of downloading the driver on another PC, saving it to a floppy and then pressing F2 (I think it was F2!) to install an additional driver during the initial blue screen version of the XP installation process. I'm not sure if there's any way round this when trying to recover an image that worked from an IDE drive. In that scenario, it might just be best to replace like for like and go for IDE; on a four year-old PC, the speed advantage from SATA probably won't be massive, even if you have the controller.
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Mark Lensenmayer
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1605
From: Upper Arlington, OH
Registered: Sep 1999
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posted 09-01-2006 12:55 PM
That's the SMART (self-monitoring analysis and reporting technology) system telling you your drive is in trouble.
Here is some information SMART article here (at bottom of page).
quote:
The Problem: A WinXP Professional user has received the following error message ever since his system had a hard drive crash six months ago.
Error Message: "WARNING: Dell's Disk Monitoring System has detected that drive 1 on the primary EIDE controller is operating outside of normal specifications. It is advisable to immediately back up your data and replace your hard drive by calling your support desk or Dell Computer Corporation."
This error message says exactly what the solution to this problem is: Simply back up the hard drive and replace it immediately. But our reader hesitates to undertake this rather significant step because the computer continues to work just fine in his estimation.
But the error message's suggested course of action is what the reader must do, says Anne Camden, a spokesperson for Dell. The message is linked to SMART (self-monitoring analysis and reporting technology), a technology that continuously monitors the health of a hard drive in search of symptoms that may indicate a major problem looming in the distance. Such symptoms include a sudden fluctuation in the distance between the drive head and the platter (suggests an impending head crash) and a gradual increase in the length of time it takes for the drive to spin up (a sign of a malfunctioning motor). SMART's purpose is to alert you while you still have time to save important data files.
"It gives you as much of a runway as possible so you can replace the drive before you lose any data," Camden says.
Under these circumstances, we must advise the reader to replace his hard drive as soon as possible. Replacing a hard drive is a relatively pain-free process these days and, if the drive or PC is still under warranty, the reader may even get a free replacement drive.
If you have this same problem, you might be tempted to disregard the message and continue using the drive. But if you do so, we recommend backing up all important data to a removable storage device, marking the backup with the date, and storing the media in a safe location. You also should perform an incremental backup (a type of backup that consists only of files that have changed since your most recent full backup) once each day, as well as a full backup to another removable storage device once each week. The backups will help minimize data loss when—not if—the drive eventually fails
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Charles Greenlee
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 801
From: Savannah, Ga, U.S.
Registered: Jun 2006
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posted 09-06-2006 03:25 AM
Today, performacewise IDE based drives keep up with SCSI and even exceed it in most areas where the home user would see benefiet from. IDE reliability is also better. SCSI, however, is still the best on quality, and in server apps, esp in RAIDs still out performs IDE bades tech. I have a built in SCSI controller on my compuer and have been tempted to get one, but they are so much more expensive, and for less space, I've stayed EIDE. When I upgrade, I'm getting a PCI-X SATA controller and a pair of SATA drives to data stripe. PCI-X (not PCI-E) and SCSI, my motherboard is a server board, in the truest sense. And I use ECC/Registered ram, and dual Xeons (2 processors). SATA is becoming cheaper, and EIDE more expensive, slowly. They will flip-flop before too long.
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