Hard drive failure at its worst can feel this bad.
So your computer won't boot anymore. Maybe it's giving you the “Disk Read Error," or “Drive Failure Eminent” has been hounding you for a couple of power ups now. Chance are, you have hard drive failure, but how do you know for sure? If you take the computer to a repair shop, chances are you'll pay hundreds of dollars just to find out that all your data is lost and you'll have to buy a new hard drive. How do you prevent that from happening? By using the Seatools Diagnostics Disk. It's an easy to use program that you can download and burn to a disk, pop into the CD-ROM drive, boot off of and scan your drive for points of failure. It may not recover your data, but it'll save you the cash for diagnostics at a repair shop, and then you can just replace the drive itself.
Instructions
Acquiring the Seatools Diagnostic disk
1. Go get to a working computer with internet access and go to http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/seatools
2. Download the .ISO file under the Seatools DOS heading.
3. Use a set of software that will burn the .ISO image into a disk (there's a lot out there to choose from, your computer or CD-ROM drive likely came with some for free).
Using the Disk to Look for Errors
4. Boot up your dying PC and pop in the disk.
5. You can select all of the test to run (this is usually a good idea since it tests all the other functions of the computer such your memory just in case this is the real issue), but make sure the Full Drive Scan is selected and press next.
6. Sit back and wait. The tests will take a while, especially the Full Drive Scan. Be patient and wait for the results.
7. Come back (it may take hours) and see if the scans come back with errors.
8. If the drive comes back with multiple bad sectors, then the hard drive is ether dieing or already too far gone. If you can still boot from the drive, back up as much data as possible as fast as possible. If the drive comes back with file-system errors, then you should ether be able to run check disk to fix the errors, or hook the drive up as a secondary (or slave) drive and back the data off. In some cases this is still not possible, but you can likely format the drive and still use it (even if you lost all of the data on it). If you manage to get any other kinds of errors, such as an interface error (with IDE or SATA) or a memory error, then the drive may not be bad, but the system board or its components could be and you should send the computer to a repair shop or pop the drive into another computer.
Tags: back with, repair shop, CD-ROM drive, comes back, comes back with, computer repair