Think I'm Losing my HD

[jimmyj68]

My system has been suddenly freezing up completely. Nothing can happen until I do a hard reset using the case button. Reset gets me a message that the bootmgr is missing. hard restarts get me the same result. Turning the system off completely and then repowering will get that missing boot mgr message also. If I leave the system off for 10 minutes or so it will then START AND BOOT NORMALLY.

I suspect that causing my hard drive to thrash too much overheats it and it is dropping off line. When the problem occurs, BIOS shows the hard drive as not present. I touched the hard drive and it does feel abnormally warm. For protection I tried to creat a system image on a back up hard drive and the process failed after 5 minutes or so with the boot mgr missing message.

Is this a sign of dying hard drive?

 

[Sp12]

Very much so. Potentially the boot sector has gone bad, but more likely it's about to die. I'd be too scared to actually run chkdsk before I had the files copied somewhere else.

I hope you have a backup or can copy over the files you need manually before it dies.

 

[lxskllr]

Very much so. Potentially the boot sector has gone bad, but more likely it's about to die. I'd be too scared to actually run chkdsk before I had the files copied somewhere else.

I hope you have a backup or can copy over the files you need manually before it dies.

I wouldn't fool with it at all until you have a way of backing up your important files. I'd boot to a CD, and copy the files to a different drive that way.

 

[somethingsketchy]

I wouldn't fool with it at all until you have a way of backing up your important files. I'd boot to a CD, and copy the files to a different drive that way.

+1

If you can boot into a *nix OS (that's on a CD), that should hopefully get you into the HDD long enough to move your important files (never mind program files, just movies/pictures/documents) and just reinstall everything onto a new HDD.

You may only have enough time to move those personal files, so make the best of it

 

[tweakboy]

Give it a proper burial it deserves. How many years did it serve you. God bless it. Just burry it in your backyard but look out fo suspsicious neighboors lol

 

[jimmyj68]

I tried running a backup to DVD of files and other hard to replace stuff. It made it through 1 DVD and crapped out after starting DVD #2. But---------it hasn't crapped out since!!!

I popped in another 1 TB drive as secondary and ran a quick format to remove stuff I didn't need anymore and it lasted fine (of course the secondary HD was doing all the work). I'm considering making the cleaned (?) quick formated HD the new C and reloading WIN 7.

Date code on the drive is 09113 which I think means it was born on 13 January 2009. I don' recall when I bought it but I can look that up on my Egg account. But I don't feel it is ready for a trip to Seagate because it has been hanging in there bravely since yesterday evening. If I send it away and it is AOK they may send me a refurb which is an antsy proposition.

I have 3 1 tb hd's lyihg around and I don't recall why there are 3. Once I entertained the idea of a raid 0 with 2 but why the third drive? Raid and backup? Replacement for an acting up HD? I don't remember - oh well such are the ravages of age - especially when you worked your mind at top speed for almost 40 years before retirement.

You can't answer my questions - just rambling. Trust the Seagate that was dropping off line on me? The other two are an Hitachi and a WD.

 

[mfenn]

No, do not trust it. Just use one of your spares and send it back.

 

[jimmyj68]

It dropped off on me again. I scoured the bios and discovered a mismatch between the bios port assignments for the HD and the boot order assigment. Ideally, SATA port 0 should be drive C and os boot. Bios said the boot HD was on port 1. Did some more snooping and found that the last time i fiddled with my HD's I had two in place and crossed the SATA connectors so that C went to 1 and the secondary drive went to 0 port. I was worried about that at the time but the video card covers the sata parts on a Intel P55SB board and you are asking for real trouble if you remove the Vid card and try to reinstall it. The memory slot clips clear the video card by less than a millimeter. Any way - getting this snafu sorted out jumped my hd score from 5.6 to 6.7 and the system flew ---and also the faster pace of the HD caused it to drop off line even quicker if doing anything that worked the HD.

The egg has an Intel 80 gig SSD on its way to me and my HD as main storage days are over by the weekend.