Need help to fix the hard drive failure

[corbie82]

Hi there

I have purchased 2 hard drives over 2 years ago both a Samsung SpinPoint F1 HD103UJ 1TB Hard Drive SATAII 7200rpm 32MB Cache - OEM.

On Monday when I loaded up my pc I got this error message: - SEC master hard disk s.m.a.r.t status bad backup and replace hit f1 to resume.

Since this has happened I ran the defrag disk and that showed everything fine as it was sitting on 0% fragmented. I then did a quick format on the drive and then a full format so that the drive has nothing on it.

I still get the same error message when I load up windows.

I have downloaded and installed hdd scan 3.3 and scanned both hard drives that did find a fault with the end to end count on the secondary drive but the primary drive was fine.

On wed when I was running a scan on the drivers a windows warning message has popped up saying that there is a fault with my other hard drives i.e. the primary drive although that only popped up once and it’s not mentioned in the boot up of the pc.

I tried to use etools which is Samsungs own diagnostic software but there is no 64 bit version and I can get it to load.

I ran a read test using the hdd scan 3.3 and it scanned the secondary hard drive it found over 7.9m clusters responded under 5ms. This was the largest cluster range however it found over 150 responded in <100ms 60 clusters < 500ms 303>500 ms and only 2 actually bad clusters.

My question is what is the next step I do intend to install win 2000 32 bit and run that software on both the hard drives.

I have heard about running kill disk and spin rite. In my limited knowledge it doesn’t seem to be that many clusters/sectors that are damaged on the drive so can I limit the damage down to hard drive and keep using it or do I need to purchase a new hard drive.

[Filiberto]

The message which you stated in your post simply says that your hard drive is falling. You need to go for the replacement. Try pressing F1 and if nothing happens then enter the bios and disable the option S.M.A.R.T. Do not forget to have a backup of your system. It is possible that anytime your hard disk will be dead. There is nothing can be done via driver update of scanning. It is due to hardware issue. There are some scan tool offers by Maxtor or Toshiba. Try them to check the integrity of your hard disk.