awe, what a friend

hi folks, once again I turn to your sage advice: I promised to do what I could to get my friend's PC up and running again. I have been able to get it to boot to windows after a chkdsk ran, I ran onto further problems after that but I figured I would start at the beginning and try to start the diagnostics and repair from there: upon bootup I get the following error message: "warning: dell's disk monitoring system has detected that drive 0 on the primary EIDE controllercis operating outside of normal specifications. It is advisable to immediately back up your data and replace your hard disk drive by calling your support desk or dell computer Corp. F1 to continue f2 to run setup utility" I have never owned a dell before- is this as dire as it sounds?

 

Hard drive failure is dire and happens with no warning except S.M.A.R.T. a few days ahead of time which I assume is what Dell's utility is referencing.

Try downloading the HD manufacturer's diagnostic utility and run the extended test to see if it can fix the errors. If there are many errors you really need a new HD. One or two and you'll probably be ok for a while. But either way backup anything your friend needs to keep immediately--you usually only get a few restarts before the OS becomes unusable and you have to reformat the drive and reinstall the OS to even attempt to keep using the faulty drive.

 

sach2 is correct. It looks like that is the boot drive of the computer. If there is anything important on the drive, I would remove the drive and slave it to another computer to back up important data.

Like sach2 said, sometimes the drive can be 'fixed' with the software. I have a few of these I use on non critical computers. Never trust the drive!

E

 

That is the long and short of it--A fixed drive should always be treated as suspect. I use one that had a few bad sectors that were repaired as an extra data partition for music and youtube type stuff but nothing I really care about.

If your going to give the comp back to your friend as "fixed" I would at minimum run the diagnostic and only if it can be repaired and gets an ok then reformat and install the OS. But still warn them it could go at anytime and they should backup important stuff.

 

Ah well, can't quite say I am surprised. Pretty much what I figured actually. Luckily backing up data was my first move. Sort of a tangent issue I'm dealing with here as well: during the process of working on my friend's pc, I had a catastrophic failure of my own machine! Basically I got the blue screen of hardware death out of nowhere during a startup, and have not been able to get a peep out of it since... I took my slave device out to check on my data, but upon plugging it into her HDD I can't seem to get windows to even recognize the drive... All I keep getting is an error with winlogon.exe. \$Mft is corrupt and unreadable. Is this an issue that might be corrected with a reformat and reinstallation of windows? Could it have something to do with my drive not showing up (or being unable to use a mouse)? Is there hope for my data? I had no warning to backup!