is my hard drive failing???

[Acoustic5679]

I recentley ran into this problem where sometimes my mobo can't detect my system hard drive. It seems to happen when I leave the pc on for a long time. like a day or so. I have woken up and the screen says cannot detect system disk in the boot up sceens. I then turn it off for a few hours and then it boots up fine. The hard drive is around 5 years old. Its a seagate 160 gig. I bought a new HD to act as media storage and I set it to slave. could the new hardrive be effecting the old master drive that is failing? I am not sure but I think the rpm's are the same on both drives. Would that effect it? If anyone could offer input I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks in advance...

 

[Ste]

I would first check if its not a power usage/monitering problem.
make sure in the Power options That the harddrive isn't destined to shut off after any amount of inactivity.
Other then that I would back up all important data just in case it does die.

There are are few bootable tools like Symantec Ghost and UBD that can scan a harddrive for problems.

Theres also HDD Health that will show you while in the OS of any problems.

 

[Acoustic5679]

Yea, my power managment is fine as far as my set up. Is HDD health free online? or do you know of any free diagnostic tool?

 

[Ste]

HDD Health is Free and so is UBD. (Ultimate Boot Disk)
The UBD will be .iso Format so youll need to burn to a blank disc as an Image (Using Nero or DVD Decrypter, or whatever program you use.)
Just google them.

 

[Acoustic5679]

great thanks a lot..