Is my HDD dying on me?

[AgentOrange]

I have a feeling my hard-drive is dying but I'm not sure so I'm looking for some advice from those in the TNR community who are computer-smart (Please don't post anything irrelevant to the topic or post if you don't know how to help)... so for the past few days I've been experiencing the same routine. I boot my computer up, the same corrupt/missing hal.dll error comes up so i go through the bootcfg /rebuild step and get myself into windows... but when i turn off the computer, the same hal.dll error comes up again... when it first started happening, i figured it was due to a trojan virus i got (so i got avg and scanned my computer and got rid of all hints of it) but my HDD seems to be crapping out more and more... so does anyone have any ideas or solutions to fix it or will I have to buy a new HDD and if so is there a way i can save the shit i have on the dying HDD to transfer to the new one? Also, I've heard of some SMART software that tells you the health of ur HDDs, has anyone else heard of this or some software i can use to test my HDD

Thanks in advance for any help, this issue is driving me nuts...

BTW, I have a diamondmax 10 HDD (if that matters)


... oh and if you believe my HDD is dying and have any HDDs bigger than 250gig that you'd recommend, let me hear the suggestions

[manofphat]

S.M.A.R.T. is built into your BIOS. Look for the setting there. This is just a quick test that detects and warns you when your harddrive is going to fail. If you enable it and nothing special happens, that means that there is nothing wrong with your drive.

HAL.DLL is your Hardware Abstraction Layer. It's one of the reasons that your hardware can communicate with your software (pretty critical). This could start coming up for a bunch of reasons although the majority of the time (in my experience) it's been the hard drive.

You can troubleshoot your hard drive using Seagate's SeaTools (Seagate acquired Maxtor). Here is where you'll find the download: http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=SeaTools&vgnextoid=720bd20cacdec010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD

Let us know if it gives your drive a green light. If so, we can start looking into other things.

[jefftheworld]

S.M.A.R.T. is built into your BIOS. Look for the setting there. This is just a quick test that detects and warns you when your harddrive is going to fail. If you enable it and nothing special happens, that means that there is nothing wrong with your drive.

HAL.DLL is your Hardware Abstraction Layer. It's one of the reasons that your hardware can communicate with your software (pretty critical). This could start coming up for a bunch of reasons although the majority of the time (in my experience) it's been the hard drive.

You can troubleshoot your hard drive using Seagate's SeaTools (Seagate acquired Maxtor). Here is where you'll find the download: http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=SeaTools&vgnextoid=720bd20cacdec010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD

Let us know if it gives your drive a green light. If so, we can start looking into other things.

Man, you guys are all so friendly and helpful here. I love Canadian forums.


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Sorry for the off topicness.


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Carry on.

[gOOCH]

i zero alled my hard drive that was f ded up, and it went from 320gb to 298, so i think that it got rid of my bad sectorz
but i dont use that hard drive for my os, only for music, but i havent had any problems since i zero alled
http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=Downloads&vgnextoid=51e092db8a13d010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD
try some maxtor tools and test your drive

[AgentOrange]

ya mano, it passed, i did some other scans with other software and it came up passing so supposedly the HDD isn't going to die haha... any other ideas?

[ORION]

Format with KILLDISK?

[Calamity Gundam]

Reinstall Windows. That error is notorious for bad Windows installs, particularly with the older windows, like Windows 2000.

So yeah, format, repartition, and reinstall Windows. On a side note, make sure you don't ever buy another Maxtor drive - they fail more often than they should.

As far as repairing goes, the repair functions built into Windows setup are pretty bad. Always better to reformat/reinstall when you get errors of this magnitude.

[AgentOrange]

ya that's an option but i'll lose all my stuff... I'm hoping to not have to reformat

[WiseGuy]

Terry, you could always backup all your stuff to DVD's if you have a burner for it, or find a friend with an external HD and back up your files and stuff there.

A good format helps from time to time anyways, i just did one and it boosted my CSS performance noticeably.

Also i dont think anyone here has mentioned it but try defragmenting if you havent done so in a while. I doubt it will fix your error but it will help your HD live easier and longer.

[manofphat]

instead of just rebuilding your boot structure, perform a Windows repair.
Stick in your Windows CD like you did to enter Recovery console but do the following instead:


Press [ENTER] at Welcome to Windows XP Setup
Press [F8] to accept the license agreement
Now it'll detect previous versions of Windows, press [R]
Gravy.