Hello everyone,

I recently ventured back into windows (couldn't get gtkpod to work, so had to resort to itunes, but that's another story) and was updating some id3 tags on some mp3s on c:\ (which is confusingly not the root drive (which is E:\), but is my storage hard drive), when windows said it couldn't write the file C:\$tmp-something-or-other (can't remember what it was called exactly - it was one of those annoying ballon notification things). Anyway, I thought, it's done that before and been fine, just reboot and you're away. Well, firstly I couldn't reboot from the menu - I had to hit the reset button - never a nice experience. So it reset, and then my BIOS gives me the S.M.A.R.T Status BAD message on the storage hard drive.

Basically I just want to know how best to proceed from here. My BIOS informs me I should backup and replace my hard drive. It then asks me if I want to continue loading the OS even though the S.M.A.R.T Status has failed, which I haven't done yet.

The drive is formatted as NTFS, so it never gets written to from my Slack installation, but would it be better to boot to a live CD? I've got an external USB hard drive which I want to dump all the data onto, would booting into Slack and mounting that and then doing be the thing to do?

All thoughts welcome :)

Thanks.

Definitely the idea once you have the data backup you may want to go to the manufacturer's website then download their diagnostic tools create the boot floppy/CD and boot with it then run the full test on the BAD hard drive.

Is there any way to rescue the disk then? I've backed up all my data, so I don't really mind what happens to the disk now, but it'd still be nice to have since it's a useful extra 160GB!

I remember when I got the disk I had a floppy with a utility to completely return the disk to zeros - but surely a hardware failure cannot be fixed by just wiping the disk clean?

Are there any more comprehensive tools to see exactly what's about to fail?

That would most likely be the disk you need to boot with and run the diagnostics choose the FULL test be prepared for at least an hour or so of it running the test, it will tell you if the drive is dead/dying and needs to be replaced if the errors are correctable then it will attempt to repair. Also depending on how old the drive is it could still be under warranty if it fails the test check the serial/model numbers at the manufacturers website for this warranty information, I've had a couple of disk fail under warranty and it is usually only a matter of putting in an RMA request and shipping the disk back to the manufacturer for replacement if you have credit card they will most likely cross ship eg ship the new drive to you then you send back dead/dying in the box once it arrives.