Vista disk failure warning

Bad sectors are harmful to the data saved on your disk. If you find there are many bad sectors on your hard disk, your hard disk may fail very soon, though it works normally now. Sound can also indicate hard drive failing. If you hear strange sounds like clicking or grinding noises coming from the drive, you should pay attention to it. At the same time, it is highly recommended to make an instant backup as your drive can be crashed at any time.

You may not think this is a problem as everything works normally. Modern hard drives have S. When S. Well, how to check S. T monitoring system? You can view a very basic S. Here are detailed steps.

Input cmd in the Windows Cortana box and choose the best match to open Command Prompt. If your hard disk status is NOT OK or shows other statuses—such as Bad , Caution , or Unknown , you should keep an eye on your hard drive or consider changing another hard disk.

It does not necessarily mean that your hard drive is going to fail immediately, but you need to take measures. The above are some typical symptoms of hard drive failure. And sometimes hard drive failure can also happen at any time without warning.

So, what should you do to protect hard drive failing? The best way is to back up your hard drive or replace it with a healthy hard disk before the actual crash occurs. To backup everything on the hard drive in a time-saving way, it is recommended to use a professional disk cloning software MiniTool Partition Wizard Free Edition.

Then select the faulty hard disk and choose Copy Disk from the left action panel. Choose a disk to copy the source content to and click Next. And click Yes on the pop-up window to continue. Review the changes you are going to make on the target disk. You may also change the partition size by dragging the handle bar or input a specific number directly.

Enable the " Automatically fix file system errors " and " Scan for and attempt recovery or bad sectors " options by checking the boxes before them and click on " Start " to begin the process. If you check the partition that contains your Windows installation, you will be prompted to schedule disk check after restart. It is common that a SMART warning is according to excessive heat, and can sometimes be repaired by improving ventilation.

First, check to see if your computer has adequate ventilation and that all fans are in good working state. If you find and fix a ventilation problem and the average temperature falls to a normal range, then the SMART error may never appear. Click " Start " button. In the search box, type " Disk Defragmenter " and then select " Disk Defragmenter " in the list of results.

Select the drive you want to defragment and click " Defragment Disk ". If you have tried all the workarounds above but the error message has not yet been fixed. If it's physical, you can't do anything physically to repair it but follow the warning: immediately backup your data and replace your hard disk drive. F12 at powerup. Mary G 7 Thorium.

Post Reply. Top Contributor. Dell Support Resources. Latest Solutions. Can't find what you're looking for? Bad sectors may happen to all hard drive and threat data security. How to check bad sectors? DiskGenius is free partition manager, file recovery tool and system backup software. It includes the function for bad sector checking and repairing. This is third-party tool and you need to download and install it first.

Launch the program and you can see hard drives and partitions clearly displayed on the main interface with detailed information. The checking process may take a while if the drive or partition being scanned has large capacity.

After the process is done, DiskGenius gives a report of bad sector conditions. Bad sector repairing damages data stored on and near bad sectors, thus you need to backup important data before starting repairing. The limitation of this feature is that it is unable to repair physical bad sectors. Solution 4: Contact hard disk support or find a professional repair center.

The last thing we want is sending hard drive to repair center or contact support team. Disk repairing needs special machines and some damaged disks can't be repaired.

It's suggested to contact support team if the drive is within the warranty period. The error message pops up when system deems your hard drive has problem and reminds you to backup data.

But there are real cases that hard drive has no problem but Windows just reports the message. So the message will be annoying and we can disable the feature with following steps:. Step 1. Get Run window from Start menu and type in gpedit. Step 2. Step 3. Click "Disc Diagnostic: Configure execution level" on the right part and a configuration menu will pop up.

Modify the execution level to Disable and click "Apply" and "OK". Then restart computer the error message won't popup. These steps keep Windows from reporting the message only but it can't repair or fix hard disk or system error.

So please make sure your hard drive is indeed in good health. Potential hard disk or system failure may cause serious file loss problem, for instance, your installed program, documents, photos, movies, songs, email and other personal information will lose.

Therefore, it is highly advised to make backup copy for important data once your Windows detects a hard disk problem. It's easy to backup data from one drive to another or from partition to partition. Simply, the Copy and Paste operation can backup most data except Windows.