Hard drive errors - need to replace drive

[Nick N]

I have an older desktop system running Windows 7 64 bit Home Premium:

AMD Athlon X2 250 processor 3.0 GHz
4.0 GB Memory
Seagate st310005 28as SCSI disk drive - 1TB
Seagate USB External Drive
NVidia GeForce GT220 video card

Windows is starting to pop up windows that it has detected a hard disk problem and indicating the issue is with the st310005 28as scsi disk volume C:\

The error in the windows event viewer is event 52, disk:

"The driver has detected that device \Device\Harddisk1\DR1 has predicted that it will fail. Immediately back up your data and replace your hard disk drive. A failure may be imminent."

I have made backups to my external drive. I am going to try and run the hard drive self test now. I'll post the results of the hard drive self test when it completes.


I have several questions:

1) Should I just replace the disk now? Its quite old anyway.
2) If so, how do I go about doing a restore? This is the windows boot disk. Can I just install the new drive and restore to it, or is there more involved?
3) Do I need to make any other backups before I start the restore?

Many thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

 

[Nick N]

I was not able to run any sort of hard disk test. I couldn't find any tests to run during boot and although I installed the Seagate SeaTools, it didn't recognize the device.

 

[Nick N]

I noticed that this error has occurred only once on 1/10/2015 according to the event logs. However I continue to get the windows message intermittently.

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there Nick N,

It is good that you have already backed up the data.
1) It will be a good idea to replace it as soon as possible as the hard drive is most probably unreliable and can fail at any time. After you get a new drive, you can use the old one for storing non important data or use it in an external enclosure.
2) The best thing to do is a clean install. Though, you can perform a cloning process as well. I can't really recommend you a specific tool though. Keep in mind that you will have exactly the same copy on your new drive. This means that if the issues with your current one were caused by bad sectors(corrupt data on these), you may have some issues with the new drive(if a program for example was damaged by bad sectors on your old drive, it will be damaged on the new as well). I believe that there are some cloning programs that work around bad sectors but again, I can't really recommend you one.
3) As you already have your data backed up on the external, I see no point in doing an extra back up. Anyway, if you have the storage, you can do so.

Is is strange that the brand specific testing tool did not recognize the drive. You can try testing it with a third party one.

Hope this will help,
D_Know_WD

 

[fzabkar]

I would examine the SMART report with a tool such as CrystalDiskInfo.

http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskInfo/index-e.html

Look for reallocated, pending, or uncorrectable sectors.

You could perform a full surface scan with a tool such as HDDScan.