Questions:
1) do the symptoms point to a hard drive problem which may need a hard drive replacement sooner or later? Or it is a simpler problem as presented by the Windows Error Reporting:
A) Yes, most likely. Windows hides away its “hive” files – files that are used to tell it how to control the operating system – so that they cannot be seen at all by the user of the operating system, but it’s a classic case of “out of sight, out of mind”. These files still exist, and if they should happen to be written to an area of the hard drive which is beginning to lose its magnetic ability, then you’ll get all kinds of unexpected errors and collapses from Windows. It won’t be able to tell you what’s wrong because it doesn’t know itself – the very files that would help it diagnose a problem are themselves stored in the faulty area of the disk.
What can I do
2) to prevent it from crashing and worse still,
3) to prevent it from losing all files and data due to a hard drive failure?
2) Short answer? You can’t. Long answer, the problem isn’t going to go away and will get worse. The hard drive is failing, and needs to be replaced as soon as possible.
3) Again, you can’t repair the damaged areas of the disk. You CAN seal off those you can find, each hard drive has what is called a “bad track listing” which marks off where on the disk faults lie so that it doesn’t try to use those areas of the disk, but this is a preventative measure, not a cure. You can isolate danger areas and stop using them, but you can’t repair them. Also bear in mind the problem will only get worse, and the bad track table is only finite. The moment it runs out of room (usually 1% of the drive capacity can be used for storing bad track data) then that’s it. The drive will cease to be rescuable at all, and when that happens, a catastrophic failure is imminent. Do yourself a favour, replace the drive before it gets this far.
For 2) Will reformatting the existing internal hard drive solve the problem? If so, what is the best way of doing it? But back up all data first for reinstallation later upon reformatting? Or do you need to? What software is the best available and easiest to use?
A) Reformatting the drive (don’t use quick format) will mark bad areas in the bad track list I just talked about, which will prolong the drives use, but it will not and cannot repair them. If it is in the middle of formatting and the drive bad track table becomes full, it will abort with the message “Bad Track Table Full – Replace the Disk. Format failed.” At which point the semi-formatted drive may or may not be usable.
But for 3) I imagine it is to back up all the data from the existing hard drive to another drive. Now since it is a notebook, it will be an external hard drive. I am thinking of buying “Copy Commander” as copying the entire drive in simplest steps is exactly what I want. My related question is, if I copy the content of the entire hard drive to a new drive, will it have the same problem with starting the computer since presumably whatever is defective is being copied to the external drive. So if the internal hard drive failed, my back up drive will not jump start the Notebook computer either. Is my assumption correct?
A) Not entirely. You’ll end up with a mirror copy of the drive at the time it was backed up, which means the second you use the internal drive your backup will be out of date. Depending on the computer, you CAN get most modern machines to boot off other devices, such as a USB hard drive, but the performance cost will be crippling. A USB2 cable can carry up to 1 megabyte of data per second (firewire, if you have it on your notebook and buy a compatible external drive, can carry 10 times that amount) whereas an IDE internal disk interface can transfer up to 20 megabytes per second, and SATA (a later standard of hard drive interface) is faster still. So if you do boot off a USB drive, any drive accessing you do is going to be 20 times slower, including the length of time it takes to boot windows. It’s doable, but it’s painfully slow. When you “clone” a disk, bad track data is NOT carried over, since each drive is different physically.
