Imminent Hard disk failure

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hi All,

today i noticed the following ominous message in my system event log from march the 12th:

The driver has detected that device DeviceHarddisk0DR0 has predicted that it will fail. Immediately back up your data and replace your hard disk drive. A failure may be imminent.

is there anything i can do to diagnose and repair?

full disk scan reports no errors. but i keep receiving a warning at startup before XP boots that “dell’s hd diagnose system has noticed the hd is working outside its parameters….

hd is a maxtor 98196H8 80 GB in a dell 8100 system. backups already made.

thanks, pieter.

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I’d contact Dell support and see what they say. If your PC is still under warranty they should replace the drive. If not they may still have some good advice about the veracity of the messages. I’d also start pricing a replacement drive.

Joe

--Joe

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Here’s my guess: it’s like that red light on your car’s dashboard. You’ve gone the number of miles recommended before going in for your next service. In addition to vacuuming out the dust, a hard drive replacement apparently is recommended at this service interval. I wonder when it will tell you your PC is obsolete and you need to go to http://www.dell.com to order a new one?

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Gosh I like Google, did some searching and found this page describing the diagnostic process and there is some information to be found at maxtor knowledge base. Quite an interesting feature.

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thanks All for the advice and the links.

in the mean time i’ve downloaded a diagnostics program from maxtor’s site (powermax) and this seem to indicate the problem is genuine (and not a call from mother dell). there’s a remote chance the more elaborate tests the program provides will succeed in repairing my disk, but i’m just going to wait and see what happens for the moment, since this has no impact for the moment on performance and file storage integrity afaics. (still more than a year of warranty)

my next ‘puter will definitely be self assembed again, those brand computers are a maintain, upgrade and security nightmare, their performance mediocre at best. ok dell is cheap, i’ll grant em that.

greetings,

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Pieter,
Have you looked into Steve Gibson’s Spinrite 5.0? A while back I was having strange problems with a Maxtor HD, erratically not being recognized or recognized as a completely different drive. Maxtor tech people advised that the HD was failing and I should think of replacing it. I ran Spinrite on it and haven’t had a bit of trouble since. No alarming error messages or anything. Spinrite DEEP scans your entire HD multiple times per sector, then rewrites the track to refresh it, all without any loss of data. Steve has had this prog out for many years and it is his “flagship” offering and is inexpensive. It works !
Check it out at http://grc.com/default.htm%5B/url%5D along with other GOOD things he has at his site.

Bob

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thanks Bob!

unfortunately, this won’t work for me as i’m using NTFS on win XP. nevertheless, the grc site is highly recommendable!

greetings,

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Download the diagnostics at Maxtor’s web site.

The message likely means that the spare sectors are (almost) fully used.

Scandisk might not catch errors if the sectors have already been remapped.

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just an update.
one week ago, the problem just disappeared – no more warnings for over a week now – how smart can smart get!
it’ll probably come back to stab me in the back i guess.
i was wondering if standby puts more strain on the hd. since i received the warnings, i have powering down the computer every night in stead of going in standby mode.

greetings,

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You need to run the drive diagnostics.

A number of years ago, I sensed odd behavior with hte drive I received with a PC.
Then it suddenly went bad, fortunately, I had done a full backup the day before.

Run the drive diagnostics.

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Pieter,

I had the same problem with a laptop. The imminent falure erro message came and went for probably 4 months.

One day, all of a sudden it went. No warning, just gone.

Get it out of there and replaced otherwise it WILL get you.

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[indent]

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The imminent falure error message came and went for probably 4 months.

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[/indent]NO warning

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Ok. Point taken.

What I meant was that the HD didn’t start acting funny like thrashing about or anything like that, with the exception of the warning.

It just failed.

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(Edited by Bowlie on 10-Jun-03 20:41. Just checked out your Bio and saw who you worked for …)

So what do you do when you hear a fire alarm sound? Turn on the TV so you can watch it on Global or CTV?

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Well, actually my TV is on all the time when I’m at work, so I don’t have to turn it on Nothing like having a 21″ TV on you desk.

When I hear a fire alarm, I don’t watch TV, I grab my stuff and head out of the building like I’m supposed to do.

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A computer is somewhat like an automobile.

We get so used to driving the critter that the gradual occurrence of oddities/noises gets overlooked.

With a disk drive, at the first sign of trouble:

a. Make a full backup on separate media.
b. Run the drive manufacturer’s diagnostics.
c. If the drive is still under warranty, try to get a warranty replacement. If you can convincethe drive manufactuer that there are unusaual noises or there are errors reported by the drive diagnostics, they’ll replace the drtive.
d. If the drive is not under warranty, increase the frequency of backups and start planning for a replacement drive.

I’ve had two drives go belly up: One due to a power surge. the other just went bad. Both were bad experiences.

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Now disk drives are “so cheap” (at least in the US) there’s a lot to be said for mirroring your hard disk onto another (identical) one. Usually for SCSI drives, but you can do ATA ones with a Promise disk controller. We specify all our new servers to have mirrored SCSI OpSys disks and RAID-5 for the data areas. Good for bacon-saving…

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I used to do that. but there is stil the possibility that a power problem could tiast both drives, even if protected by a UPS.

Just last week, I purchased a CD-RW, 2 external USB drives, and a USB 2 adapter, as well as Retrospect Pro v6.5.

Each USB is 80GB, which is larger than my total internal hard drive space.
So I’ll alternate using each uSB drive for backup.
Nether USB drive will be connected or plugged in to power when not in use.

With Retrospect Pro, I canmake a bootable CD-ROM, which would allow recovry from the external USB drives.

The USB drives came with a watered down version of Roxio and SimpliCD, but I also purchased Nero.

I still have the SCSI tape drive, but when you take into account cost of tapes, the external drive solution is less expensive and likely more reliable as tapes do go bad more often than drives.

Deending on sped of USB drives, I might use them for incremental backups as well.

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