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Thread ID: 49850 2004-10-02 20:36:00 Hard disk failure imminent camford (2367) Press F1
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277727 2004-10-02 20:36:00 Hi all.
I have a Packard Bell N3200, Athlon 1.8, 512 mermory, Win XP Home.
It is about 1 and a half years old
I have had a couple of warranty repairs in this time, shortly after purchase the power supply cooked and was replaced and early this year the motherboard was replaced. Possibly damaged by the "cooked" power supply but they don't tell you these things.

I have just checked Windows Event Viewer and found this message from yesterday.
" The driver has detected that devise \Devise\Harddisk0\DRO has predicted that it would fail.Immedediatly back up your data and replace your hard drive.A failure may be imminent"
Not what I wanted to see on a Sunday morning !

First of all how would have the driver predicted this and could this be a false alarm or is it a sure sign of death ?. I have not seen any sign of my computer playing up recently.

Secondly, are there any programs that I can download that would allow me
to check the health of the disc ?

I now have a job to do this afternoon, to get my stuff on to CDs.

Thanks for any help
Paul
camford (2367)
277728 2004-10-02 21:01:00 Windows has a built in Check disk utility.
Go Start/run and type chkdsk
Have a look here (www.microsoft.com) for Check disk options
Davesdad (923)
277729 2004-10-02 21:07:00 If you can find out the name of the manufacturer of the HDD, go to their website, as most manufactures will have a program there, designed to carry out a range of tests on the drive.

You will get a comprehensive report on the drive.

HTH
Curly (487)
277730 2004-10-02 22:58:00 Thanks for your help Davesdad and Curly.



I have run the check disc utility. It just did its thing and then closed without telling me if there was any problems .
I have found that the drive is a Maxtor 4 D060H3.
There is a disc checker to download of the Maxtor site so I will try that this afternoon.
I have also found a disk checker called HD Tune 2.0.
When I did the health test everything was ticked OK apart from something called "Reallocated Sector Count" .That was failed.
Does anyone know what that means ?

Also the time of the failure message was 4.30 pm yesterday. I used my computer a lot last night and also this morning. If there was a serious problem would have the message not re accured ?

Paul
camford (2367)
277731 2004-10-02 23:03:00 > I have found that the drive is a Maxtor 4 D060H3.
> There is a disc checker to download of the Maxtor
> site so I will try that this afternoon.

It's called powermax.exe, about 1meg in size. It creates a suite of diagnostic tools on a floppy disk which you run to get some great info on the hard drive's state of health.
Greg S (201)
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