Hard Drive Failure?

[jvjakesta]

I work for a business that uses a bunch of old and refurbished computers. They're crapping out on the daily and some of them have hard drives that are almost faulty, or dead.
Right now, I'm troubleshooting for an older woman who left her computer on overnight during a storm.

My question for you guys is, is there anything I can do about her hard drive after diagnostics noted a disk failure?

This is the error I received:
Fail PSA V4220 Error 2000:0142. Hard Drive 0 - S/N WD-WMC2H0079034, Short self test unsuccessful.

I can't seem to boot the computer in safe mode, I can't launch system restore because the repair utility won't run, and I can't get the computer to boot normally without a blue screen after windows tries to start up. Any thoughts?

 

[Dunlop0078]

Well my initial thought is that the hard drive is dead, if it wont boot into safe mode thats probably because there is nothing to boot or it cant be booted because something has failed in the hard drive.

 

[ss202sl]

Fail PSA V4220 Error 2000:0142 is a failed(or failing) hard drive. It needs to be replaced. You may be able to pull data from it - since it seems to partially work, but ultimately the drive has to be replaced.

 

[Solandri]

Try replacing the SATA or IDE cable first. That's an easy fix, and a significant number of the "dying hard drive" problems I run across turn out to be a bad cable. If the motherboard has multiple SATA/IDE ports, try moving the cable to a different port as well.

If that doesn't work, try mounting the drive in another computer to see if it still reports a fault. If the drive operates normally on another computer and the cables are good, the problem is probably the motherboard of the original computer.

If you're convinced the drive is faulty and it has important data on it, you can try buying an identical (working) drive and swapping the mainboard. Lightning usually just fries the electronics, not the magnetic data on the platters.