Testing Hardware?
 

Heya,

Somehow just now the computer made a really weird noise and then it shut down. On the next reboot (a minute later) I got "Disk Boot Failure" and I was asked to place the "system disk" and "enter"

So I shut the computer and checked the connections to the hard drive which were all intact. So I just unplugged and replugged it back on. Now I'm on the computer again. I'm kinda scared that it might be failing and it's time to back-up the files (my secondary hard drive has already failed and it takes to long to format so I haven't gotten to it... long story)

Anywayz is there a device to check the hardware's health status? BTW I have win xp home and it's a tragic media center

Would appreciate any help and thanks ahead

First you should shutdown your system and get something that doesn't need write access to your harddisk. If it's really the harddisk then writing to it is possibly the worst idea at this time.

Get yourself some Knoppix live disc (DL from another machine), boot your (faulty?) system with it and do a check with smartctl (from the smartmontools package, Knoppix should have this integrated).

You can output all SMART information with
smartctl -d ata -a /dev/hda (or /dev/sda if the Knoppix kernel uses the new ATA layer, or some other devicename).
Then let the drive proceed with some short selftest (check manual for command, I don't know them by heart) and check the SMART log for failures. If the short selftest doesn't fail then issue the long one and check again.

In my experience taking the time to test a disk may be just long enough for it to fail completely.

I would take the drive to another computer and back up everything important on it ASAP. Don't use it until then unless absolutely necessary.

A short SMART selftest runs in like 3 to 5 minutes. And I'm assuming she has already a backup of the data on the drive. If not then probably the data wasn't valuable at all ;-)

I don't think he did, like 99% of the people.

Learning it the hard way then... :-)


(I also did...)

I'm a SHE!! >....<

Anywayz thanks I'm in the process of backing up my data... so a "smart" test huh... I'll look into that (dun know what it is) but I'll see how to work it

Corrected, sry...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Mo...ing_Technology

EDIT: Funny, you're exactly one day younger than me *g*