Question Hard Drive failure warning after factory restore

[arthurguy321]

Hi, my 7 year SONY VAIO was not turning on because of an error so I decided to restore it to factory settings by pressing F10. After everything restored like the computer was first time out of the box it began giving me SMART messages of Hard Disk Error upon turning on my computer and I need to press F1 to proceed. I’m doing system restore again and every time the computer restarts now I have to press F1. This has never happened before and only began after I restored the computer to its factory settings. The computer worked for a day and then I couldn’t get past a black screen after the welcome screen. Safe mode also got stuck and froze up. I thought factory restore was supposed to get rid of all errors not revert the mission back to its previous bad state after 1 day. When the system allows me to get into the computer again, what should I do to prevent it from doing that black screen after it loads the welcome window? Should I uninstall and then install the graphics driver? Would a windows 7 reinstall disk have the same effect as a factory restore? Please help!

 

[jimmysmitty]

If you are getting a hard drive failure outside of Windows from the BIOS from SMART then the drive is failing. It might have been the factory restore or just a coincidence that you did a factory restore and the drive started to fail.

SMART is an internal failure prediction counter built into a HDD and read by most motherboards to help predict a failure.

 

[mdd1963]

If the computer in question uses a spinning drive, odds are it's image used for a 'factory restore' is merely a partition on the same drive...; if the drive is now suffering from issues (certainly at 7 years old, this would be an easy probability), odds are merely rewriting (or reinstalling from different media) the software and OS onto the same (potentially problematic) drive may not help. As you've already factory restored, I'd assume you have no data to worry about recovering from it before a potential drive failure...

You can try cloning to an external USB connected hard drive of sufficient size, then cloning back to an SSD, hoping that the VAIO's BIOS does not object to any new hardware for storage. (Some pre-builts use safeguards to prevent their install/restore media from being used with any other hardware config) Most OEMs use specific activation keys for the OS that might not work with a retail WIndows media, but, if you have a set of valid keys, I guess it won't hurt to try...

 

[arthurguy321]

Thanks for replies, so is the only way to fix all of these issues to replace the old drive with a new hard disk drive and all the issues will be resolved?

 

[jimmysmitty]

Correct. A SSD should be pretty cheap and would also improve performance of the system.

 

[arthurguy321]

If my hard drive is 1,000 Gigabyte how many Gb’s would the SSD have to be to match 1,000 Gigabytes of HDD storage?

 

[ElectrO_90]

If you want more precise information on your failing HD download and install Hard Disk Sentinel

 

[jimmysmitty]

A 100 GB HDD is considered a 1TB HDD. A 1TB SSD would match space.