Dying HDD?

You should copy the data immediately as a precaution. This is just good practice anyway.

Have you looked at any SMART data for the drive? This can be an early indicator that the drive is having trouble.

Non SSD 6Gbps hard drives are totally pointless right now. They aren't fast enough to saturate 3Gbps nevermind 6. So save your money and just pick up a SATA2 drive. Maybe consider a SSD if you need a speed boost and can handle the smaller drive sizes.

I would download and run seatools from the seagate website.

I've just run Seatools and it's failed the Short DST, guess that's it then. If I were to get an SSD for windows 7 only, what sort of size would be reccomended? Also would games benefit much from this or shall I save money and get a SATA II HDD?

I have a 80gb intel x25 its a good size but the crucial realssd c300 is now the king of the ssd hill. the 128GB is just under $250. I think you could get away with the 64gb around $125. A SSD is nice for reduced boot times but I dont think it makes a big differance in normal usage.

I've not ventured into that area yet but Id read the Tom's reviews and here are some deals for you.
http://www.logicbuy.com/search/ssd

The boot failure message, by itself is not the kiss of death. The sound might be. Is it a rhymic click that sounds like two hollow tubes being lightly hit together? That sound is an extremely bad sign. I can not remember ever hearing that and not having the drive fail very soon after. Often it has already failed beyond repair.

As other have said, move your data off immediately. You may have a few hours of run time left, but I would assume it to be more like minutes than hours.

I love the Cariar Black series. Some tests show the 2TB Black beating the Velociraptor. SATA III is often $10 more than the same drive in SATA II. At that price difference, it's a no-brainer to go with III. At $30 difference, it would depend on the specific applications.

Thanks for all your advice. I downloaded SeaTools for DOS and booted up using this. This found the disk errors and also repaired them, and so far all is running fine. I guess what I was hearing was the drive skipping over sectors on the disk rather than a mechanical failure developing.

I think I will now get an SSD to run windows off and also to use as data back up (i don't have much important stuff!) I'm guessing 64GB would be enough for this? Also are there any known compatability issues surrounding SSD's? The one I'd looked at was the Crucial C300 and my MOBO is a Gigabyte P55A-UD4.

Andy

Just make sure your BIOS is set to AHCI mode for your SSD before a fresh Windows 7 install.