Hard Disk Fail

[Qazwsx]

I was running Windows 98 SE, and one day upon boot, the hardrive made some terrible grinding noises, and then froze on the boot - saying something similar to "Hard Disk Fail." At the time, it also spoke of a handful of missing files. After restarting, it worked fine. This happened several times.

I then formatted the drive, and installed Windows 2000, ran virus check several times, and thought everything was dandy. Then, a couple days later, the same thing happened, except this time, it just says "Non System Disk Error." Of course, I check to see if there's a floppy in the drive, which there isn't. And as always, after a restart, it seems to work fine. I seem to be a glutton for random computer errors which only occur 1/3 of the time on startup...any ideas?

 

[jackschmittusa]

I'd say that the hd is on its last legs. Soon the bearings will probably sieze. Save anything important now.

 

[MedicBob]

Replace the drive if it is making noises. Staples has a pretty good deal on an 80 gig one. Look in Hot Deals.

 

[Bglad]

Make backups immediately (if you aren't doing that already you are asking for trouble) and kiss that drive goodbye.

 

[Qazwsx]

Damn, I was afraid of that. I wish there was a quick way of transferring 40 gb worth of files...Well, thank you all a bunch -

qazwsx

 

[capricorn]

Originally posted by: Qazwsx
Damn, I was afraid of that. I wish there was a quick way of transferring 40 gb worth of files...Well, thank you all a bunch -

qazwsx

When I have to do this, I hook the new drive in as the temporary slave drive, copy everything over using xxcopy, swap the new drive in as the boot drive and go on. There's a lot of FAQs there to cover various situations you might have. For freeware, I've been pretty happy with it. Something like Norton Ghost ought to do the same thing though.

-cap