upcoming hard drive failure

[Luis ORTEGA]

Two days ago at work when I started my win xp pro system, it hung for a
while at the startup screen trying to find the primary master hard drive
then went to a blank screen that said press any key to reboot. When I did,
the system booted up ok. This happened two or three times (but not every
time I started the computer).
Then yesterday when I started the computer, the start-up screen found the
primary master quickly but a warning appeared that said, "imminent hard
drive failure- backup and replace hard drive- press f1 to continue.."
When I press f1 the system starts up ok and appears to work fine, but since
today, this warning message appears every time the computer is turned on.
The hard drive is not making any unusual noises (yet), and the system
finishes booting ok and appears to work without problems.
A co-worker seems to think that it has a virus in the fat tables, but this
is a standalone video workstation not connected to the internet.
I just rebuilt it three weeks ago when I upgraded the motherboard and I used
the 40 gig hard drive that had been my video drive as the c drive, and added
a new 80 gig drive as my new video drive. The 40 gig drive was partitioned
and formatted by win xp before installing the os.
I have built about 20 computers already, so I am not totally new at putting
computers together, but this is a new problem for me. In the past, when a
hard drive has failed, it has just stopped working and the computer wouldn't
even start.
Does this sound like a hard drive failure coming on or could it be some
virus type of corruption?
Would running something like norton utilities help me find out what's going
on, or even repair the problem?
And if I did a copy and paste of my entire c drive over to the video drive,
and then replaced the c drive, could I simply copy the files back to the new
c drive and avoid having to re-install everything from scratch?
Thanks a lot for any advice.

 

[Willit]

Hard drives fail for lot's of reasons and many diffrent
ways. if you have a second drive this will copy it for you
and is great. then jusy copy it back.

Casper-XP

http://www.fssdev.com/products/ $ 39.00 make the clone
and then un-plug the power to the drive if you want.

Want to test drive a Demo for 30 days. It has some
features disabled, you can only copy a whole drive and it
will not re-size partitions.

http://downloads-zdnet.com.com/3000-2248-10161152.html?
tag=lst-1-8

 

[Crusty \(-: Old B@stard :-\)]

If you are getting a warning from S.M.A.R.T., believe it. It is the built in
diagnostics, within the hard drive, issuing this warning. Ignore it at risk
to your data.