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Answer» Hello all, me again. So, this 6-year-old Sony Vaio I have is acting up again it seems, though I think it might just about be ready to keel over, anyway here's what goin' on.
Upon booting up the computer, good ol' American Megatrends pops up and gives me a few key (bad) details about my Hard Drive, these details being:
''3rd Master Hard Disk: S.M.A.R.T. STATUS BAD, backup and replace. Press F2 to resume.''
Now, I only have one real HDD, my Maxtor STM3160915AS 3.AAC Ultra DMA Mode-5 (As it appears listed in the same ''status report'' as above), and so I'm assuming it's just partitioned or something to a ''slot 3'' (bad choice of wording, on my part). It's listed as ''Third IDE Maxtor'' in my BIOS.
I cruised around the net for a while and found out that either A) My HDD is going to die soon, or B) the S.M.A.R.T. firmware thinks it's going to die soon. At least, that's what I could find. However, should the latter be the case, I could find no way to make sure and check the integrity of the HDD. I mean, if for some reason the firmware thinks my HDD is going out, but it's really not... how can I make sure? Wouldn't all other methods of checking access the firmware first in some way? I'd assume so, since that's what it appears to be made for... checking the status of the Hard Drive.
When I had a Master Boot problem posted in the XP section a while ago, I checked my HDD with that one Maxtor thingy program that I simply cannot REMEMBER what to call, anyways checks the HDD for ya and all... ran it off a disc. It showed no problems. Now, I'm aware that after 6 years, this thing is probably on it's way out the door anyway... but having been in fine condition (According to the SMART thing or w/e) beforehand, I'm still a bit skeptical as to whether it's actually dying or not.
One other thing that worries me is that now, somehow, Firefox refuses to open up. It keep crashing before the browser comes up, and rebooting doesn't seem to fix the problem. Are the two events related somehow? Seems odd, as I can open up Internet Explorer just fine (Which I'm using right now)
So, what I'm really asking is this... is there a way I can check the HDD without using it's S.M.A.R.T. thingy? Could it possibly be some sort of 'soft' problem as opposed to the actual hard drive itself? And least important, why won't my firefox open?
If there's another thread or database aspected to this, I greatly apologize for wasting the space, and I would greatly appreciate any help or a link to any previous threads/information.
Thank you. 1) Backup all critical DATA
2) Download the hd dignostic utility from the website of the hard drive manufacturer and run it or
3) Run chkdsk /r
4) BACKUP ALL CRITICAL DATA NOWAll my data has already been back'd up.
Maxtor's Diagnostic tool confirms it, ''this hard disk drive is failing''
Diagnostic Code: 4000FFFFFFF4FFFFFFB6100
So, am I right in assuming there's no hope for this hdd? I just gotta wait until it fails? Can't exactly replace it at the moment.I hear you, but I'd find a way to replace it now. Your SYSTEM is about to become inoperable.Quote from: MegamanXZOBMV on June 28, 2010, 11:02:35 AM but having been in fine condition (According to the SMART thing or w/e) beforehand, I'm still a bit skeptical as to whether it's actually dying or not.
One often sees this "it worked all right before, so it can't be broken now" line of thought very often about hard drives. Oddly enough, people don't apply it to light bulbs, they just change them. SMART monitors the hard drive for errors signals when the number has reached a threshold. and The most basic information that SMART provides is the SMART status. It provides only two values: "threshold not exceeded" and "threshold exceeded". Often these are represented as "drive OK" or "drive fail" respectively. A "threshold exceeded" value is intended to indicate that there is a relatively high probability that the drive will not be able to honour its specification in the future – that is, the drive is "about to fail". The predicted failure may be catastrophic or may be something as subtle as the inability to write to certain sectors, or perhaps slower performance than the manufacturer's declared minimum. The drive might work for a long time. It might fail next week. But you can't say you haven't been warned, and you'd be kind of dumb to trust it with really valuable data. So go with Allan's advice. It is absolutely on the button.
Hm. Good logic there.
I've already backed everything up, so I'm not worried about that much more.
However, would ''inability to write certain sectors'' have to do with my firefox being unable to open up? It was working fine, obviously, before the HDD started dying, and when I tried to install a program to create an image for all my stuff on my computer (namely XP, which I have no discs for, save OEM Recovery discs), it gave me a ''Hardware I/O'' error, and couldn't continue the installation process. Am I right in assuming that the error is also related to the HDD beginning to fail?Yes, of course.Aww, *censored*.
Alright, thanks a lot for your help you two. ^^ Guess I'll work on gettin' a new hard drive then.
Much appreciated.
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