Computer Acting Oddly

Moltres423

Moltres423

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On Christmas morning the first thing I'm told by a family member is that our computer won't work. It refused to come back on(It would power up but wouldn't display anything). Obviously this was pretty bad because everyone in the house wanted on to play with their new Christmas video games or software(I got Cataclysym, my bro got Starcraft 2, my sis got some photo editing software). I did the only thing I knew how to do and I unplugged everything, dusted the inside with a can of compressed air, looked to see if anything was out of the ordinary, turned it back on and it somehow worked. I finally got it up and running in less than a half hour and avoided potential disaster, but I know there's something wrong.

Upon loading up the first time, the screen went blank again and I determined that the interval the computer appeared to be "dying" at was when it went into standby. I restarted the computer that day, was able to turn off standby and the computer functioned, but I'm almost positive that my hard drive is going bad at me due to some error messages I'm seeing in the event viewer. Heres one(There's like 50 of these in the past day):

An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk0\D during a paging operation.

Additionally when I go to "My Computer" to see the hard disk drives I can see that one has a 143 Gb capacity (Presario (C: )) and the other has a 5.13 GB capacity(PRESARIO_RP(D: )). I think its odd that these numbers aren't exactly even, what's going on here? Either way the second one appears to be the bugger I think, and when I open it I can only see two files, a 212 KB file called "recovery" that can't be opened, and a text document called CPCinfo that's only 1 KB. When I right click properties the D drive it says that 3.86 GB are being used... and I'm almost positive that I saw more files in there last time I looked; something's going on here too.

So my question is , does it look like I have a bad drive? This computer is eight years old(Compaq Presario SR1010Z) and it wouldn't shock me that its showing its age. Where do I go from here? Do I go out and buy a replacement drive and how would I transfer stuff over or?

Thanks for any and all help guys, I'm no expert at computers, but I definitely know how to follow directions. :lol:
 
The D: drive looks and sounds like the partition that companies put the recovery software on. I doubt it's bad.

However, my first guess is that your hard drive is starting to fail. Use a program to check its SMART status, and it'll likely tell you if anything's failed, or if it's showing signs of failing. Western Digital and Seagate should both have programs to check the SMART status.

My first guess before I even read the part about the hard drive error messages was already going to be hard drive failure, since it's something that I've been encountering with this WD Scorpio Blue HDD I got around Black Friday from Amazon, that I've already submitted for return.

As for replacing, you need to find out what kind of hard drive it is, because chances are, it's still an ATA-100/133 instead of SATA. Then buy one at least the same size. Then you can use a tool like Clonezilla to clone the old drive to the new drive. You can then use GParted to fill up the rest of the drive to make it useable.
 
elessar is correct. The 5GB D: drive is just a partition of your C: drive, which contains manufacturer and recovery files, and is not an actual second hard disk. Don't worry about that.

It doesn't sound too serious, just run some sort of disk check/scan and go from there.
 
Do I have to buy a program check the smart status?

btw1217- is that in the properties section of the drive? do I have to do each one?
 
Thanks Lawyers! Ran it twice(One while comp was running and another with "/f" after restart)

Lots of orphaned files were moved and it did a bunch of other fixing/repairing. Computer goes into standby like a pro too. Do I still need to replace the HDD? Do I need to back it up(What would I buy to do that)?

Thanks for all the help!
 
[quote name='Moltres423']Thanks Lawyers! Ran it twice(One while comp was running and another with "/f" after restart)

Lots of orphaned files were moved and it did a bunch of other fixing/repairing. Computer goes into standby like a pro too. Do I still need to replace the HDD? Do I need to back it up(What would I buy to do that)?

Thanks for all the help![/QUOTE]

How much data you backing up? 9/10 you can do it online using a free service like Megaupload. Your games you can reinstall. Your save files for SP games should he saved via email (email yourself).
 
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