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Had a hard drive failure yesterday (first for a few years now - the drive head went). According to the HD details it should have SMART system built-in, to detect problems before they occured. Unfortunately it doesn't - the first think I knew about it when XP crashed - no prior warn and no message during the POST test...

The only think I can think of is that you need a diagnostic program run from a floppy in order to get any hardware errors.

So, until I can afford a new HD for that machine (its the oldest of the three), I'll have to use Knoppix Linux on it...

And no, Linux doesn't work totally fine - for some reason the networking system doesn't work (although the internet does), but at least it doesn't crash on initialisation (like it does on my laptop), or forces a VSYNC error on my TFT monitor (like the previous version).

But at least the Linux version of Freecell can be played...

Yeah. I tried madrake linux and couldn't get anthing to network. But i did get internet.

Linux is great if you have the patience to mess with a craploada configuration to get everything and anything running. It's an interesting alternitive to just predicting 3 crashes in the first hour every time you do something new in Windows.

Sorry about your HD!

Some motherboads (like my MSI one) will supposedly display a message if it detects the hard disk is about to die. It uses the S.M.A.R.T. system as well. You can however get some software, like 'speedfan' that you can have running in background that will monitor the SMART bits of hard drives and will give you a warning.

My hard disk has been annoying me lately with an annoying whine and the odd click here and there so I pre-empted a failure and bought a nice new quiet Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 which I did some research into and found it is supposedly the quietest IDE drive available. How right they are. The difference is astounding!

I have literally just finished reintalling windows XP onto it and the umpteen pieces of software littered around and all my old data. What an exercise that is. Still, got a nice new clean system now without all the rubbish I have had installed over last two years.

I haven't tried any other hard drives, but I too have a Seagate 'cuda 7200. I could hear it rev up once in a while, which kinda annoys me. And I'm running out of space... less than 1.5gb left.

There is a known problem with Seagates and S.M.A.R.T. so they end up dieing alot well before thier time, particularly if your system is prone to rebooting because of hardware conflicts.

The only real solution is actually not to skimp on the price of a new HDD that you plan to use as you boot disk.
However just be luck you were using Windows when it happened and not a Unix deritive, because you just get a few bad sectors and it drops read cycles dieing under Windows; atleast most of your data is still accessible. Under Linux you loose the entire HDD, I actually have 2 prime examples sitting in a cupboard at home that explain it better.

SMART however is also bad for Windows. As Windows will detect problems on it's own, particularly Windows XP if you HDD is SMART compliment, however if your motherboard has it's own detection running it'll turn off (without booting down) and disable access to the hardware until it had been disconnected and reconnected.
This not only makes you think a disk has died but actually causes ALOT of bad sectors and can damage the hardware more than if Windows handled it.

Personally I keep Windows itself of a basic 20GB HDD with Smart off and my data on others with it on.
What is annoying is when it was introduced like 5years ago, it was added to almost every board but NONE explained what the hell it was.
HDD Manufacturers aren't exactly forthcomming with letting you know what thier hardware is capable of either.

I'd suggest taking all the data you have off the HDD and just using it as a Storage/Backup drive now; you keep a boot sector on it, you'll just cause more and more extensive damage.

@Raven: Ouch, I might have to save up for a new hdd then. A Seagate 80gb will cost me nearly 3 months of my school allowance.

edit: btw, my drive is partitioned. if I get bad sectors on one of the partitions, can I still recover the data from the other partition?

Yes, you should be able to.

Unfortunately data from the failed drive is unrecoverable - and I'm not paying £900 to recover the little data I would like from it... I should have kept the data on the second hard drive though - oh well!

I might turn off SMART the next though

I usually only use either Maxtor or Western Digital drives - did try Fujitsu once, but the two drives I had from them both failed well before they should do.


Thanks! I should have known of the first loud click what was going to happen, but as it had been running for pretty much a whole day, I had forgotten about it - too busy playing C&C:Renegade