HDD Possible Death Warning?

[ReSpAwN DeMoN]

A few weeks ago my brother turned on his PC and it gave him the error message telling him that he didn't have a proper boot device and that he needed one or something. Its the screen that like if you have it set to boot from the cdrom and there isn't a cd in the drive. Anyway he was booting form his HDD when it said this. THis was similar to the same stunt that my PC played on me when my deathstar came to the darkside. Anyway it was fine after a few reboots and a few playing with cables here and there and has been for weeks.

Up until yesterday that is. We went to format windows and upon formatting right when it got to 100% it gave a nice big error message saying something to the extent of "the partition cannot be formatted it might be damage or not plugged in. Please plug in a working parition. We attempted to format the drive AGAIN and went at it like 3-4 times all getting the same error message upon reaching 100%. I don't know what went wrong. Anyway the next day after a whole day of the computer being off we went at it again and it worked. He's now running a fresh install of windows and everything is wroking great.

Its an old Maxtor 40GB 5400RPM....Its about 1-2 years old at max I don't know. Could this mean a possible death in the near future and these are like early warning signs? :?:

[Wiggo]

I know a lot of ppl that would be amazed that it lasted this long but have ya been to Maxtor's website and downloaded their hard drive test utility? :?:
<center>:cheers:</center>

[ReSpAwN DeMoN]

Nope, but I'm assuming that should be one of the first things that I do when I get home today huh?

[Wiggo]

I think ya got the idea then. :D

[Maxpowers]

check if u have S.M.A.R.T enabled in your bios this will tell u upon start up that if your hard drive is about to hit the bucket. One day i also turned on my computer and i got the message right at the bios telling me in flashing letters WARNING WD(something or rather)20g is about to fail you should backup your data" so i backed some stuff up and off to WD it went, 2 weeks later i get a new hard drive :thumb:

[sKuLLsHoT]

yes as Maxp said, ensure there is SMART enabled in the bios, its pretty certain the drive/mobo will support it, then keep an eye on disk manager in windows XP and also the bios for any failure/degraded performance errors. if the drive is in use and giving errors you may get "delayed write" warnings, or windows might just reboot unexpectedly...

one of my 2x 80's started giving errors in disk manager the other day so I'm RMA'ing it and getting a 120Gb replacement, (all maxtor still)

if similar thing is happening, easiest way to tell is in dis manager, a little exclamation mark appears next to the Disk# that is the dodgey one..