Western Digital 120Gb HDD, Failure Imminent
 

Just looking for a bit of advice on this one. Around a year or so one morning when i went to start up my PC the process stalled on the first page with a message blinking at me...

"WARNING: HARD DRIVE FAILURE IMMINENT. BACK UP ALL YOUR DATA IMMEDIATELY"

Or words to that effect. Now i hit F1 and it started as normal, as it has been doing so for the past year - i know, i know. :o The problem has become more frequent however so last night i did a 'Disk Cleanup' as well as a Defrag (first since building the unit 2 years ago). Everything went well and i also did a quick error-check which didn't appear to uncover anything.

Anyway, the drive is a WDC WD1200AB-00DBA0 or Western Digital Caviar 120Gb 7200rpm in English. What's my chances of the clear-out and de-frag solving anything? Do i live with it and see how things pan out or get that Seagate bought in anticipation now?

I have a spare 120GB WD drive in there also for added capacity and regularly back-up the files i'd hate to lose. Still, i'd rather get this sorted before it catches me out...

Carl you could do a few things for sure.
I take it for granted that you system drive (the one that reports its failing)
has only one partition on it. ( ie the c drive uses all of it).
An that the stuff you want to back up is in " my documents".

You could continue backing up as u currently do... or
right click the "my documents" on your desktop > select properties.
In the centre you see the "target folder location".
change that to say D:\MY DOCUMENTS
(if your other hard drive is seen as D: on your system)
If you the apply, it will say the folder " xxxxxx" does not exist, would you like to create it.
Say yes, then you get the option Would you like to move all blah blah blah.
Say yes, then all will be moved to new location.

Now anything that is saved to "my documents" is automatically stored on the other hard drive.

What I would also do with your current failing system hard drive, is to "Image" it. ( I take it, its a normal IDE drive)
Using imaging softare like ghost, ( various methods).
You can boot from floppy with it, run ghost and create an image of your failing hard drive and dump the file it creates onto your secondary drive.

It does not wipe out the secondary drive just creates a file on it.
You can then put in a replacement drive, and then carry out the reverse.
Boot with ghost floppy, restore from image ( on spare drive) and reboot.

some ideas anyway, cheers

Cheers FT. Had never considered moving the My Docs folder but have done so now and things appear to be running smoother. There are other things i'd hate to lose, primarily my OE Inbox and wwwroot folder.

That said i haven't had a dodgy start-up since but it has been known to go for weeks nigh months without one. If it does it again i'll get another HDD bought and image the current one onto it.

Thanks very much for the help and advice. :cool: