Hard Disk Failure, but computer still works? Ten points to best answer.?
This is absolutely infuriating. I have a custom ordered computer from Dell, it's only about 7 months old. It's a very large gaming rig and I maxed out the specs to get some quality hardware. A few days ago, while playing a game, everything froze. I tried quitting out but it froze up. After a lot of force closing and such I got a message saying I had hard disk failure (yes it is a legitimate warning, not one of those scams). Sweet. Awesome. I restarted it, and an American Megatrends boot process came up, saying that there was an AMCI Port 2 device error. I skipped through it because there's nothing I can do from there, and booted the computer as normal. It tells me there's a hard disk failure and to back up everything, shut down the computer, and call support. So I backed everything up and shut it off.
Here's the issue, the computer is working perfectly fine. The only things that happen are that every time it boots it boots to the American Megatrends screen, and when I fully boot it says that the hard disk is failing, but I can still use and access EVERYTHING. I've shut down and turned the computer back on multiple times, it still works. Personally, I think this is ****ing ridiculous that it would fail before it's even a year old, and now it looks like I have to call them up and wait for a box, ship it, wait for a month for them to start repairing it, and another month to get it back, not taking into account all the horror stories of people never seeing their computers again after months of waiting and calling support.
Has the hard disk just not failed yet, and is on the verge of doing so, and it's just a matter of time? Or can I restore everything and avoid making an already maddening situation more maddening?
I have only one main hard drive, when they repair it I am going to install a secondary to act as a copied version of the main so if one fails I'll still have the other.
After the American Megatrends screen, it doesn't go to the BIOS boot screen, it loads as usual, starting up Windows, letting me select a user, and loading my desktop. I can access and use every single program on my computer as though nothing were wrong. If not for the message that popped up saying "The hard disk is about to fail" you'd never know it was going to.
Also, all of my data is backed up to an external hard drive, safe and secure. My theory is that if it's not an actual hard drive failure it has to do with the game I was playing. Amnesia: The Dark Descent was being run, and it began lagging for a second, and then froze. I quit, restarted the computer, and then everything was fine.