Help with Hard Disk Failure...?

Hi There;

The system is warning you that the hard drive is failing. This is so that you can back up your data before it dies. Hard drives can last years but then can also last months. There is no predicting when they will fail.

Back up your data, buy a new hard drive and restore your windows to it.

It is always safe to get a new hard drive if your current one starts to fail. You can make a back up of anything you can, and then try to get a new drive. All you have to do is take your hard drive out of the laptop, get a hard drive enclosure (to turn the hard drive into an external drive), hook it up to a working computer, copy all your personal files over, and install the fresh hard drive in the laptop.

My suggestion would be to buy a new laptop. 2 years is a pretty long time for a laptop.

Yes a hard drive can fail at any time just as the operating system can crash at any time due to corrupt files.

Back up any thing of importance on a regular schedule so as not to lose your work, pictures etc. and before making any system changes.

Replace the HD and or even upgrade to one with larger storage (say a 160 GB to a 500 GB) then install new original operating system using a set of recovery disc made for the lap top. Easy to do.

The recovery disc set has the original OS and all correct drivers and utilities for the lap top on them.

The recovery disc set can be ordered by model and serial number from http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/siteHome?lc=en&...

You're getting the warnings because the SMART system is reporting that the drive is failing. What it is most likely seeing is that it is getting read errors, which you would not notice because the drive will read the data again and get the correct data. Basically, the drive is most likely failing.

Harddrives fail more often than you'd think. If I were you I'd backup all files on a separate hd, reinstall Windows and see if the problems/warning messages are still there. If not you'll have a fresh system to work with, if not... well, it's better than losing all your data.

Of course the hard drive could be failing. If you have valuable stuff on it try to copy it to another media just in case.

It does sound like your hard drive is failing. Remove the drive and blow off the contacts and if the problem still remains, then you show replace the drive.