I have a Gateway laptop and it has been acting weird lately. It has a 500GB Seagate hard drive in it. I ran the Seatools diagnostic software on the drive and it did NOT pass the test. Informed me to back up the data now & then stated the following:
Unfortunately, your Seagate product has failed an important diagnostic test, possibly caused by problem sectors which are difficult to read. Seagate recommends that you run SeaTools for DOS, which has the ability to repair most problem sectors. SeaTools for DOS may be able to save you from the inconvenience and down time of exchanging the drive.
I was thinking of just replacing the drive as it appears to be failing, but after chatting online with a Gateway tech, they are telling me I should simply do a system restore. They said if the drive was failing it wouldn't be detected in the BIOS (and presumabely wouldn't boot up at all either). In other words, it either works or it doesn't.
I am willing to basically wipe the drive out and reload Windows 7 from scratch (as I have already backed up important data), but what is probably the better route here:
Unfortunately, your Seagate product has failed an important diagnostic test, possibly caused by problem sectors which are difficult to read. Seagate recommends that you run SeaTools for DOS, which has the ability to repair most problem sectors. SeaTools for DOS may be able to save you from the inconvenience and down time of exchanging the drive.
I was thinking of just replacing the drive as it appears to be failing, but after chatting online with a Gateway tech, they are telling me I should simply do a system restore. They said if the drive was failing it wouldn't be detected in the BIOS (and presumabely wouldn't boot up at all either). In other words, it either works or it doesn't.
I am willing to basically wipe the drive out and reload Windows 7 from scratch (as I have already backed up important data), but what is probably the better route here:
Completely replace the drive
Totally wipe the current drive and reinstall Windows 7