"harddrive Failure Imminent..." (!?!)

[Buick From Hell]

Anyone ever have THAT pop up on your computer as you're booting up?? (black screen, also says to back up, etc...)

One of our work computers did that this morning, to my brother in law... Does anyone know HOW the computer would knows this, and HOW "imminent" IS the failure? There's been absolutely NOTHING wrong with the computer, and this particular one gets defragged & scanned weekly (although it hasn't been surface-scanned for awhile) It finished booting fine, and is working fine at this moment...for what it's worth, this computer has NEVER been connected to the internet.

I've had 2 hard drives fail before, and never got any warning like this?!

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated!! TIA!

 

[3mta3]

is this coming from retrospect remote telling you that you haven't backed up?? I do this for a living and I have never seen anything like this prior to a harddrive failure

 

[T-top87GN]

It's an error message from good ole scan disk. I've only seen it while doing a surface scan of the disk (the scan that takes a long time). Backup the important stuff until you can get another drive.

I've seen scandisk say that about a drive and that drive lasted forever, also seen them last a few hours.

hehe you guys complain about our cars being finnicky and weird. Try working with computers!

 

[Buick From Hell]

Not sure what you mean by "retrospect remote"? but this computer is just an HP Pavillion 6300 running Windows 98, about 3 years old with a 20gig drive (it's actually my brother in law's computer)...it's totally stand-alone, it's used to drive one of our engravers, and besides the engraver software, it has the typical assortment of games, "office" and other assorted "home" PC stuff on it. Nothing fancy...

 

[Buick From Hell]

Just re-booted, here's the exact message verbatim (comes AFTER the "HP" logo screen)

SMART failure predicted on hard disk 1: Maxtor 51536H2-(PS)

WARNING: Immediately back-up your data and replace your hard disk drive. A failure may be imminent.

Press F1 to continue.

 

[striker_29]

It is probably on its last leg Kevin. I would probably go ahead and ghost it to another drive and be done with it.

 

[xrunner123]

I have been getting that on every bootup on a second drive that I have installed. I upgraded to a 120G from a 30G, so I just use the 30G as a backup drive. I have seen this message for about 6 months- so far so good.

Is it new? What size and how long have you had it? If it is a few yrs old, I would bag it and get another one. I would not trust it.

SMART is supposed to catch problems before they show up. Does it work? who knows. It stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology and takes all sorts of data such as spoolup time, temperature, etc. and tries to predict failures.

 

[Foolis]

Self Monitoring Analysis And Reporting (SMART)

The drive thinks it's dying.
It's probably right.


BT