Failing Hard Drive. HELP

[Decimator]

A few days ago, when I booted up my computer, Windows XP Home advised me that a scan on Hard Disk Drive D; needed to be scanned. I let it scan and when it completed, it found like 16 KB in bad sectors. this worried me a little. (The hard drive is hardly a year old) So I decided to do a more thorough scan, I told it to automatically fix. I let that happen over night cause I knew it might take a while. When I woke up the next morning, I had gotten an error message from the BIOS. It said this:

Dell's Disk monitering system has detected that Drive 1 on the Primary IDE Controller is operating outside of normal specifications. It is advisable to immediately back up your system data and replace your Hard Disk Drive by calling support desk or Dell Computer Corp.

Strike the F1 key to continue, or F2 to run the setup utility.

Well I cant call Dell, they wont do anything about my hard drive, cause it is one I put in after I got the computer. I can call Maxtor I guess but first I wanted to see if anyone here could help me out. Thanks

Carter

 

[redbeard1]

The drive monitoring software is mostly useless, most drives I've had fail, go with no warning. But when it does come up, it is advisable to do something about it as quick as you can. The drive is probably going to fail.

I worked on a guy's computer that had a smart drive monitoring error, for a more than a month, so he was basically blowing it off, and he when finally brought it in to have it looked at, it failed to boot one last time to get his data.

Maxtor's drive diagnostics may repair the error, or give you an error code that you could use to rma it, if it is under warranty.

 

[Decimator]

ok, I will try the diagnostics. I'll let you know what happens. Thanks

 

[Decimator]

One more thing, do you think it is going to be a problem if I dont have anything that came with the hard drive? (box, receipt, instructions, warranty card etc...)

 

[Decimator]

(rolls eyes) And NOW my display started flashing after I removed the drive (Yes I shut down and all that) What is going on here?

 

[redbeard1]

Maxtor is pretty good about warrantying drives. You can check the warranty for your drive online. Somewhere buried on there site is instructions for sending in a drive. The most critical part of those directions, is that they want at least two inches of foam on all sides of the drive when you send it in. This is even more than the original box that they came in, most of the time. For a fee they will send you a shipping box, or you could do it as a cross ship(?), where they send you a drive first, after you give them a credit card number for a deposit, then you can send the drive back in the box the new one came in, and then they refund your deposit when they get the returned old drive. They also want you to use a shipping service with true tracking, so usps priority is out.

 

[Decimator]

Yeah, I went to the site, the warranty expires 10/20/04, Drive came with a 3 year warranty...Strange it is already failing. I am filling out an RMA, I need to reboot first and get a code. And can someone tell me why my moniter is flashing? lol, Strange computer. Thanks for the help.