I have had my Seagate Barracuda 1TB hard drive for about 3 months and my computer has started shutting itself down, usually when its trying to load my OS. I've been able to run seatools and it passes SMART and the short fix all and short generic. However, when I try to run long generic or long fix all my computer will shut down while these tests are running. I've run the windows memory diagnostic as well and thats yielded nothing so far. Can someone tell me if my hard drive is beginning to fail?
Failing Hard Drive?
- Thread starter acecold3
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volcanoscout
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Do you have another hard drive available? If so, you can clone your OS drive to it - this will give you a backup just in case the OS drive packs it in. You can also swap the cloned drive for the possibly faulty one. With the clone running as the boot drive, you can verify that the first drive was the issue, and you can test the first drive when it's not supporting your OS at the same time.
Usually a fail or a failure to complete indicates a failing drive, but not always.
Usually a fail or a failure to complete indicates a failing drive, but not always.
volcanoscout
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Probably - easy to find out. Clone the OS drive to the external, then change your BIOS boot priority to USB, then reboot. The drive activity lights should tell you if it's working. If it does, open and close some programs, play a game, shutdown and power up a few times, see if you get any shutdowns. Then run Sea Tools on the internal drive and see if it completes.
volcanoscout
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Macrium and Acronis are popular for cloning:
http://www.maximumpc.com/how_clone_hard_drive_or_ssd_2014
http://www.maximumpc.com/how_clone_hard_drive_or_ssd_2014
This is probably just me being bad at computers, but I can't seem to make the external hard drive bootable. From the looks of it, I've cloned my OS drive and its made its own partition on my external drive, but when I boot up my computer it still boots to the internal HDD. My BIOS sees the external drive and its set to boot before the internal drive, but it doesn't look like its actually booting from the external HDD.
volcanoscout
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Is it in a USB 3.0 port? If so, try it in a 2.0. It's a bit of a toss up whether it works or not - for booting PCs like flash drives in USB 2, but external HDDs not so much. I've done it before though so I know it can work...
I tired using a 2.0 port, but it still doesn't boot from the external drive. I cloned the reserved drive from my internal drive to my external drive and switched the boot priority. Am I just doing this wrong, or perhaps using the cloning software incorrectly?
volcanoscout
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Hmm...you are doing it wrong, but only because you're following my instructions. I did a little more checking - it can be done with an external, but not necessarily with a cloned image. I could be wrong, but it may only work with a clean Windows install, and it's a lot more involved than I remember it being. Sorry for the wild goose chase.
Unless you want to crack open your external HDD enclosure and mount the drive as an internal using a SATA connection, you'll need to get another internal HDD. With that, you can do the clone swap as we discussed earlier.
Unless you want to crack open your external HDD enclosure and mount the drive as an internal using a SATA connection, you'll need to get another internal HDD. With that, you can do the clone swap as we discussed earlier.
I don't think I'd want to crack open my external drive, but with my internal drive failing to complete the seatools long generic test before my computer shuts itself down can I be reasonably sure that my hard drive is beginning to fail?
volcanoscout
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It may not be the ONLY issue with your system, but yes, you can be reasonably sure your hard drive is beginning to fail. Seagate offers advanced replacement options, so you can get the replacement before you ship your current drive to them. You can then install the new drive, clone, swap, use a program like DBAN or CCleaner to clear your info off the old drive, reformat it (if you can) then send it back to Seagate.
http://support.seagate.com/customer/en-US/warranty_validation.jsp
http://www.dban.org/download
http://www.downloadinfo.co/lp/ccleaner/190/?_u=tir52lig6d5fk3u9k3protrk9dv6ucjpp68tb790hvi6586f1pq0-bf89eb7182e5cb34d95bddbcc3e2a160
http://support.seagate.com/customer/en-US/warranty_validation.jsp
http://www.dban.org/download
http://www.downloadinfo.co/lp/ccleaner/190/?_u=tir52lig6d5fk3u9k3protrk9dv6ucjpp68tb790hvi6586f1pq0-bf89eb7182e5cb34d95bddbcc3e2a160
volcanoscout
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- Jan 5, 2014
- 2,861
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