Potential hard drive failure: What do I do?

March 3, 2004 5:03 PM

Potential hard drive failure: What do I do? [more inside}

Whenever I start my laptop I get the error message, "SMART Failure predicted on hard disk 0:IC25N040ATC204-0-(PM)." What does this mean? What do I do? Just how imminent is this? I've been using it for about a week, is it likely to break down at any second? Essentially: HELP!

And on a second note: can you have more than one hard drive in a laptop?

posted by stoneegg21 to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Depending on how severe the problem on the hard drive is, it could be another few weeks or another few hours. If it's a minor problem, scandisk should be able to fix it (try running in safe mode).

I would suggest backing everything up immediately and replacing the hard drive.
posted by rhapsodie at 5:30 PM on March 3, 2004

piggybacking on stonegg21's question, I have a Maxtor external Firewire drive that failed on me due to me not giving it enough room to breath (heat failure.)

Is there anything I can do to get that data back aside from a professional service? I think the data is all there, the mechanism is fried.
posted by gen at 6:28 PM on March 3, 2004

have a look here.
posted by MzB at 8:39 PM on March 3, 2004

If you're really worried, keep it spinning until you've copied your critical data off. Keep your computer on, turn off powersave modes that stop spinning the hard drive, etc. Starting up is by far the most stressful part of normal operations for a hard drive.
posted by NortonDC at 9:57 PM on March 3, 2004

200 ways to revive a hard drive (Google cache).

Not meant for long-term revival, but just enough of a life support measure if the HDD (seemingly) fails before you can get your vital files backed up elsewhere. But do backup immediately.
posted by Dreama at 2:09 AM on March 4, 2004