My hard drive is dying

Posted by Kurisu, 27 December 2009 · 51 views

Well, a few months ago I had my main HDD go fritz on me: the freezer trick worked, and it has been working pretty normal ever since; or at least to my knowledge it has, as this computer is kinda funky anyway.

Whatever case, I checked HD Tune today to check the stats on my new 1.5 TB External HDD (for backups no less ^_^) and I discoverd a nice big red flag on my main drive:

RAW READ ERROR RATE: Failed

This is one of the major flags, meaning this drive could die at pretty much any moment.. or I could have another few years out of it. @_@

So, I duno what to do or think. I do need a new computer, sure, but I wonder what I can do to save Maria.. she uses EIDE drives, which basically means, well, I am screwed on getting a "new" drive. Everything is SATA now...

Any advice guys?

Cybergoth
Dec 28 2009 12:49 AM

I had the same problem and found an easy solution. I just copied the Windows folder from C:\ to D:\ plus all system files from C:\ root to D:\ root. Then I made the second drive bootable (with fdisk IIRC) and now I can just swap them in the BIOS and it's booting fine from either drive.

Since then I'm just installing games on C:\ and hold all important data on D:\ - that way, should C:\ finally die, I can just throw it away

(I tried & tested this with Windows 98 only, I'm not sure wether you can just copy any newer Windows from one drive to another

)

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shadow460
Dec 28 2009 3:32 PM

I tend to ignore most hard drive errors. If it refuses to register in the BIOS or on the controller, OR if I get a message saying I need to contact customer service on PowerMax, then I worry.

I run multiple drives on all my machines. One has a dual boot of 98SE so that it is always ready to run even if I have a data corruption or a hard disk failure (the latter hasn't happened yet, knock on woodgrain). The others typically have one drive for the OS and the other as a data drive.

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EricBall
Dec 31 2009 6:41 PM

There are SATA to IDE adapters available on eBay. People use 'em to put huge SATA drives in older TiVos.

Replace the dying drive and get yourself a USB adapter for it. Easiest way to pull stuff off.