Crap! Is my harddrive dying??

[RambleOn]

My system is a Tbird 850mhz, Gigabyte motherboard with a VIA KT133 chipset, 30gb Maxtor IDE hard drive, 7200rpm. Lately, my computer has been hanging when it goes into "sleep" mode. I'll come back to the computer and it won't respond, and the monitor light stays orange on standby. When I do a full shutdown and restart it won't recognize my any of my drives, it just gives 2 beeps and stays at the detecting IDE drive screen. Up until today, just shutting it off and restarting one more time and everything is fine. Well just now it got stuck in standby and I had to turn it off/back on twice in order for it to start up, and the S.M.A.R.T. drive system says "Bad drive, backup and replace" or something to that effect. I'm wondering if the drive is really failing (doesn't make any odd sounds), or if there is a bug or glitch somewhere that's doing it?

 

[RambleOn]

Yeah I just rebooted again a minute ago, the S.M.A.R.T. message came up again "Status Bad Replace and Repair". Does anyone know how the SMART utility has come to this conclusion?

I only have about 10gigs worth of data on this drive, and I have a newer Maxtor 20gig 5400rpm drive. What would be the best way to copy everything over? If I did an XCopy, then gave the newer 20gig drive an active partition, it should work, or do I need to use Norton Ghost or something like that?

 

[RambleOn]

Hmm.... I ran the Maxtor Diagnostics software and did the 90 second basic test. It failed one test: "Write/Read Buffer Test failed". Hmm, anyone know what this means?

 

[GFORCE100]

It means you should replace it quick. Use the advanced method with Maxtor so they ship a new one to you before you ship the old one back. You'll need to provide them with your credit card.

 

[AlastorX82]

uh oh...

My maxtor drive kinda does that. If I ever get a BSOD, or if I have to turn the comp off right away, and restart, the drive doesn't spin up. My mobo beeps twice. If I leave the system off for like 5 minutes, and turn it on again, the drive spins up, and everything works fine...