re: Hard Disk Detects imenent failure
Saturday, April 14, 2007 at 12:20 am
Posted by Ed
(603 messages posted)
Your description of the fault is unclear. Are you saying that at some point you had
dual-booting of Win ME and XP on the original hard disk? And that you only had XP
installed on the replacement disk?
If the hardware won't run either Win ME or Win XP without crashing, and you've experienced
the same fault with two different hard disks, the problem is unlikely to be caused
by the hard disks or by Windows. You would not see the same identical fault with
two unrelated hard disks, each running a different operating system. It's likely
to be a hardware fault, due to something other than the disks.
And if you successfully booted using XP, that would seem to indicate that XP is not
incompatible with your hardware.
Test this by putting your old hard disk into another (compatible) computer, as the
primary master on the IDE cables. Does it boot the system? If so, it would seem to
be undamaged. In which event, suspect a hardware fault in either the motherboard
or power supply unit of the original computer.
If not, try it as the primary slave in the other computer. Can the disk be reliably
read and written to as the primary slave? If so, it would seem to be undamaged. Suspect
a motherboard or power supply unit fault in the original computer.
But the problem could equally be caused by a bad (faulty) IDE cable, or perhaps even
by a faulty (or loose) power supply connector. So check those cables.
If a hard disk was damaged by the fault, check out the disk with S.M.A.R.T. while
it's in the other computer. You may have to enable the S.M.A.R.T. function in the
BIOS (press DEL on startup to enter the BIOS program). You could also run Scandisk
to check it.
Was it a S.M.A.R.T. warning that you were getting, about the imminent failure of
the disk? Or did you have that function disabled? An error message of this type is
normally generated from the system BIOS, using the S.M.A.R.T. technology.
This error message can sometimes be an indication of an incompatible drive, but that
can hardly be so in the case of your original hard disk. What brand of hard disk
is it?
Ed
On Wednesday, April 11, 2007 at 6:13 am, Terry Akin wrote:
>I had the samething happen to me and I had to reinstall XP as a parallel install.
> Then you still have access to all the file on the first install.
>I ran a disk cleanup and it came back with "Hard disk detects imenent failure" but
>it would finish booting up if you pushe"F1" as instructed. After about a month
of
>getting this message it finally just stopped booting up. I put in a new hard drive
>and put XP on the drive for the operating system since I didn't have a Me disk.
>It loaded fine and ran for a couple of bootups and then it started giving the same
>message " hard disk detects imenent failure" so could someone tell me if the motherboard
>is shot or is this system just able to use XP. Thanks in advance!
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