Is my hard drive failing?

[fenderxrocksx]

I am having a problem with my Seagate Baracuda 120GB 7200RPM hard drive. It has been running fine for about 2 years, but today, it did something very strange. I was overclocking my processor (Athlon 64 Winchester), which had been running stable at 2.4GHz, so I was in Windows running Prime95 at 2.5GHz with a modest bump in voltage (~.05v). So anyways, I was trying to download the new Windows Defender from Microsoft while running Prime95, and naturally it was a little laggy, but when I clicked on the "Validate your Windows" button, Windows freaked out and got really laggy, the taskbar disappeared about 10 sec later, then I got a blue screen saying a critical system process had been stopped. I figured my overclock wasn't stable, so I reset my computer but it got stuck on the BIOS spalsh screen (DFI LanParty UT NForce4 SLI-DR). The IDE activity lights were stuck on, so I figured there was a problem with the hard drive. To make a long story short, after much swapping around with other hard drives, I finally put my ear up to the Seagate and heard a strange "hummmmmm" that sounded like the platters were jammed. I gave the drive a firm hit with the palm of my hand, and suddenly, the drive spun back up to life and started working completely fine!!! It booted right up into Windows and I'm running SeaTools on it right now.

Sorry for the long post.....here's my question:
Is my drive on the verge of failure? SHould I back up all my stuff and throw it in the trash?

Thanks for looking.

 

[Harvey]

First, YES! You should always have your drive backed up. It's hardware, and it's never a question of whether your drive will die. It's just when?

Download Seagate's drive diagnostics, and run it. That will give you more info about your drive than anyone can give you on a forum.

If their diagnostics are like others I've seen, they'll have a longer, deeper test option that could take all night. While it's running, go out and get another 120 GB drive, a mobile rack and a copy of Norton Ghost.

Ghost can be run from a floppy disk, and it clones your hard drive onto the other drive. Mount the second drive in the moblie rack, power down, insert the floppy and your backup drive, and run it.

If your drive becomes virus infected or otherwise FUBAR, just clone your last known clean copy back, and you're up and running. When your drive dies, the Ghost copy will run exactly like the original one. You'll be out a cheap piece of hardware, but you won't lose any time re-installing your system or rebuilding your setup.

I run it after every virus and spyware sweep and before I install any new program on my sytem. If you Ghost regularly, you can't fsck it up any worse than you can unfsck it. I can Ghost my 80 GB drive in about 10 minutes. I built a newer system for a friend with a pair of 120 GB SATA drives, and his machine only takes about 4 minutes to Ghost. You can't do "the three S's" (sh8, shower and shave) that fast.

 

[bendixG15]

from above.............
You can't do "the three S's" (sh8, shower and shave) that fast.

Haven't heard that in a million years...

 

[fenderxrocksx]

Lol 3 S's.....

Anyways the ironic thing about this is that I had just backed up all my important stuff literally minutes before the failure happened. I got a copy of XP Pro a few days ago and wanted to reformat my HD, which had XP Home on it, so I was backing all my stuff up this morning. Haha I guess I'm just lucky . SeaTools just finished its deep scan and it failed some critical test... time for a trip to Fry's.

Thanks for the help Harvey.