UH OH!!!!!

"Primary master hard disk S.M.A.R.T. status bad.
Warking immediate back up your data and replace your hard disk drive. A failure may be imminent"

so uh can you guys help me out and tell me if im tottally screwed or not?
that message shows up when the computer is starting up. i've been doing some reading and the smart thing is supposed to tell you if your computer is gonna explode or whatever. is there anything i can do to fix it besides getting a new hard drive? what causes this to happen?

thanks guys!

 

hard drive's going bad. backup as soon as possible. it's gonna crash. you're gonna need a new hard drive.

and if you start to hear it click, not a good thing..

 

I would get a program that can read your "CEL" properly. Just like cars, the S.M.A.R.T monitoring system gives you a more exact error code if you look for it. Then, see if it's a small failure or something bigger. If it says it can't get a code or whatever, don't risk it, it's your data.

Haven't done this in a while, so I am not sure what the latest stuff is. I have a very solid setup right now so I didn't really need to research into much. All I know, it's possible

Try Google.

 

Yup. Get a new hard drive and transfer your data over as soon as possible. It won't last much longer.

 

in my opinion you dont try to fix or find out whats wrong with hard drives.

no matter the cost, you are always better off buying a new harddrive. youll always be surprised on what kind of deals you can get too...

dont mess with this.. backup and get rid of it.

 

At least you are getting a warning. It is never a matter of how long is any hard drive going to last only a matter of when is it going to fail. They all fail at some point, it is not a hammer.

 

Calg3 is right at least you are getting a warning, but it is my experence that hard drives can some times be like a transmition. I have had hard drives fail SMART and last for years, but i have also seen the SMART system be right on and drive fails 15 min later. So you really don't know but if your data is worth anything to you start getting it off and once it is all off, if the drive is not dead yet you can always keep useing it (And backing up as you go) untill it does.

 

Is your hard drive making funny noises? Put your ear right next to the machine and listen.

Was it a specific program that gave you this warning?

Just wanted to make sure before you go through the painstaking process. I know it's better safe than sorry, but there are a few spyware programs out there that'll do this.

A must for right now is to back up your data. You should do that anyway.

 

the smart thing came up when booting up. its all good now. got a new hard drive and tansfered everything over. it ran for 24 hours straight transfering everything (including windows) over to the new hard drive. thanks guys!

 

(cool that you got it all saved Kevin!)

For the sake of someone else coming through and wondering about SMART, here's a backgrounder (head's up though, the site is the home of some $$$ monitoring software, but the information is valid):
http://www.ariolic.com/activesmart/s...echnology.html


Like was said above, Google can turn up some apps to tell you more about what's happening - here's one app:
http://www.passmark.com/products/diskcheckup.htm

It's a bit old (8/2005) but the way SMART is, once you write an app to decode the information, there's not a lot more that you can do - plus it's free.

 

That's cool. For those that don't know, Norton Ghost is a great program that images your entire hard drive and then reimages it onto the new one. I use this to backup my hard drive image in case something fails. To me, it's not just good enough to back up the data but important to backup your setups in the computer by doing this.

 

ok guys. so i got everything put over onto my new hard drive. but now i can't get windows mini player down in the task bar. i try to turn it on in the task bar, but it wont turn on!! its driving me crazy! can anybody help me out with this?

 

From the help file:

1. Right-click an open area of the Windows taskbar (such as below the system clock), point to Toolbars, and then click Windows Media Player.
   
   This first step turns on the feature and must only be performed once. A check mark appears next to the Windows Media Player command to indicate that it is turned on. To switch to mini Player mode in the future, simply perform step 2.
2. In the Player, click the Minimize button.

What happens when you try that? If "Media Player" isn't listed as a toolbar, yoou may have to re-install it. Which brings up the question of... How did you copy everything to the new drive? Many things won't like just being "copied", yoou may have to reinstall 'em.

 

yeah its there and everything. but when i click on the WMP part it doesn't put a check next to it and when i minimize it i just goes back to the task bar.

i used the disk that the hard drive came with. and it just did it all on its own. would this be something that MWP is messing up on or is it actually windows? everything else works fine so far.

 

So... the new drive came with something where you put both drives in the machine and it images from one to the other? n'k... hmmm.


It's a registry binding, so it's a bit of both.

I would re-install MP, I'd bet that'll fix it:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...DisplayLang=en

 

yeah put both drives in and the cd that came with the seagate just did all the transfering.

 

Cool.. okay, so given that this all started with a SMART error, then it's possible that you'll be finding some things that are quite right (due to disk errors). When you do an image copy, it'll copy bad sectors as well as good.

Try the reinstall and see if it helps. If not, then format the drive, sell it to me for $5, and buy a Mac.

 

hahahahaha
reinstalled and now it works. thanks marky! hows the job thing goin now days?

 

Cool!


Move along now... Nothing to see here...

 

hahahaha hope that picks up or has picked up for ya