Hard Drive Failed

Jolly_Roger

I have an HP Pavillion laptop running Windows 8.1.

I turned the machine on today and my account took ages to load. When it did, it wasn't my usual account, but a stripped down version of the same. It had none of my information in My Documents, but programs such as Dragon and Libra Office were available.

My desktop photo had also gone and there was just a simple colour backdrop.

I tried the Guest account, but that appeared to be totally intact.

I ran HP's System Quick Test and on the Hard Drive Short DST Check, I got a "FAILED". I then tried the more extensive test and that also FAILED, giving a string of number and letters indicating the fault.

Usually, when the hard drives has a problem, nothing works! But the computer appears to be still able to access everything other than my settings.

Does that mean this new version of my account is OK to personalise and will it still be there when I turn on and off? Or, does it mean I must get another hard drive?

Oddly, I'm writing this email on an older HP laptop whose hard drive also failed after about a year's use! Inbuilt redundancy?

All advice much appreciated.

OneADay

If its saying its FAILED - it could be any number of reasons - bad sectors most likely.
Would not try extensive tests on it if you want to keep your data.
Back up all the data that is important to you to another drive.

By sounds of it - you need a new disk.

Further reading

http://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Hardware/Hard-disk-Short-DST-test-failed/td-p/3008857

closed

if you can, search for your data and copy it off while it's still working

http://www.voidtools.com/

if you hadn't mentioned the failed, it would probably just be a corrupt or temporary profile, meaning your photos would be still there

Laz123

What make of hd? My HP had a Fujitsu hd and only lasted two years, the shortest lifetime I've ever had in 12 years. (they were notorious for failing)

It maybe the hd is on its way out so I would advise the same and backup any data. The hd maker will have a testing tool which may be better than HP's.

Jolly_Roger

Looks like its bad sectors!

In such cases, they recommend replacing the entire hard disk. Grrrr, it is not yet two years old.

As I said before, two HPs and two failed HDDs

The hard drive on this one is from Toshiba.

hjibds

Sounds like your profile us corrupt, you should be able to access your documents by browsing the hard drive c:\users\<username>

Back up what you need then replace the hdd, if you don't store much on it upgrade to an SSD to give your laptop a real speed increase!

Jivesinger

hjibds wrote: »

Sounds like your profile is corrupt

I'm wondering the same thing.

Is there an icon at the bottom right that says something like "You've been signed in with a temporary profile"? See the yellow picture on this link, for instance.

http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/38817-you-ve-been-signed-temporary-profile-fix.html

Jolly_Roger

The most bizarre thing has happened!

Closing down the temporary account, I allowed the computer to automatically update. When I booted up the next day, my old profile returned, as though nothing had happened at all!!!

I rechecked the hard drive and it continues to fail the diagonistic test.

Question: do you think I should still change the hard drive or can I limp on? The old account has lost nothing as far as I can see...

GunJack

back up all your data NOW in case it does completely fail....

Jivesinger

Jolly_Roger wrote: »

I ran HP's System Quick Test and on the Hard Drive Short DST Check, I got a "FAILED". I then tried the more extensive test and that also FAILED, giving a string of number and letters indicating the fault.

Does the Failed message indicate that the disk has a problem? Or is it saying that the HP test won't run at all? You might try running the test in Safe mode if it's the latter.

Either way, I would do a full backup before anything else, as mentioned.

closed

make a disk image backup with macrium reflect free, then if it does fail you won't lose a thing and can put a new drive in easily