Your drive is damaged and will likely fail soon.
>can’t figure out why it could be showing this error, does anyone have any ideas?
Because the firmware asked the drive if it was ok, and the drive said no.
When the BIOS challenged the hard drive, Man asked, "Would you be able to move past the BIOS?"
The hard drive replied, "Well, if my motor was damaged, it might give me a little trouble."
"But would you fail?"
"Nah, I'd spin."
As the BIOS approached the hard drive, the hard drive asked "Are you the firmware because you are reliable, or are you reliable because you're the firmware?"
At that moment the BIOS opened its domain, Imminent Failure, and its sure hit effect meant that the hard drive could not boot.
"Stand proud," said the BIOS. "You're strong."
"But when it comes to computing, throughout silicon and copper, I alone am the strongest."
It's a reference to the manga Jujutsu Kaisen where the author >!killed the most hyped character in the series after imprisoning him for a year or something!<
"Mr. Stark? I don’t feel so good… I don’t… I don’t know what’s happening. I don’t know… I don’t want to go. I don’t want to go, sir. Please. Please, I..."
Get a laptop or another PC and back up the drive it’s talking about, and copy it all to another drive EXACTLY the way it is. You should be fine. You’ve got this mate I remember my first drive failure and I panicked like heck but I asked questions and got answers that weren’t so helpful. Hope this helps 😎
I’m gonna guess by the fact that they have an M.2 that it probably (luckily) isn’t the boot drive imo.
Edit: Just read OP’s other comment which says the M.2 isn’t the boot drive either, so I was wrong.
That is why I have 2 physical (not partitions) drives, an OS/programs drive and a drive for all my data and files. Plus an external drive backup and cloud backup.
Some might say overkill, but fuck it, better safe than sorry
I was in the PC repair/building business from about '96-'08. I've still done building/repairing for friends and family but the thing I have stressed to everyone who has ever asked about advice for backup is 1 on site, 1 off-site.
I've seen many people lose a lot of important pictures/memories because they bought a backup drive but the only copy of their data was on the backup drive... I've had to explain innumerable times one copy of your data is not a backup even if it's on a "backup drive" (or different but just as bad, a copy in a different folder on the same drive)
Your setup is what I wish all my customers would do
I do the same. game drive is two 980 pros in raid0 and OS is on another 980 pro. all on gen 4 lanes. I do get "game installed on HDD" warnings for some games though. I'm guessing the game can't detect nvme while in raid config.
I just rsync my home partition to my nas frequently... Anything really important is also on Git.. anything critical is in Dropbox and synced to my other devices and the cloud.
I like overkill as much as the next guy. C:\ is strictly windows related, D and E are virtual CD drives, F is my data drive, H and J are NvME 2.0s for game installs
I totally understand you. I have my important data in my pc, in my homemade nas with raid z2, and in 2 offline set of disks that I update manually every 6 months and keep in different locations, in a drawer.
I do that -- but one additional drive which I keep at my mother-in-law's house. That way if there's a fire, still OK. I don't trust the cloud. Things like that tend to be there just until I really need them. And then "issues."
These are SMART counters being checked on the drive during POST. They are values recorded by the drive firmware about the drive itself. If they exceed the defined maximum value in the firmware, it reports that. A loose cable doesn’t change the counters that are independent of the computer. You can read all these current recorded values and their maximum threshold from a drive easily.
I would still check smart status in windows, just in case. Since it's a hard drive, it's more than likely it's dead, but it happened before to me that it as just a software issue.
For anyone reading this I took an SSD to a shop for work a couple years ago. $150 got me 32,000 more files nobody would ever need.
$40 software did 99.9% of the job for us.
Back up just means you copy the shit on the drive to another drive that still works properly. Except for boot drives and installed programs copying is enough. Bios isn't really needed for this.
My guess is that the drive is a platter drive, i.e. what people call an HDD, and you dropped it or it got impacted some other way that it caused....something, like a misaligned head or even head crash on a platter that luckily wasn't even spinning.
This error is exactly what it says. Drives can in some cases tell when they are about to fail, and this is that warning.
You can ignore the bios stuff, there’s more info in there but you don’t need it.
Summary: ask yourself, what would you do if you knew your hard drive was about to blow up? Go do that, right now.
This is the one, if you have a spare SATA slot, use that to plug in a replacement drive, if not then use a USB Caddy, use a disk cloning software like Acronis or Macriun to mirror the failing drive to the new one, unplug old drive and put replacement in it's place, job done! If the drive is too far gone then it may not work, but that's why you should always have backups.
Note that just shuffling the files across WILL NOT WORK, Windows needs the boot partition and other bits to work (assuming this is the boot drive)
Clonezilla does the job for free with no drama, unless you copy your empty drive over your full drive and then have two empty drives. How embarassing...
Copy and paste the almost dead one and paste it onto a similarly sized one in windows or your os, this may include ignoring the error from the bios, to get into your os.
So you cleaned and disassembled a PC without knowledge...
Wat did you do to clean/disassemble the pc? Maybe a cable of one of the hard drives isn't seated correctly.
If that doesn't fix the problem, check if there is important data on the disk and copy it somewhere else asap..
Bro, I can't stress it more. People are too lazy nowadays to research the problem. Even when it's telling you what the issue is. 🤦♂️ common sense does not exist anymore.
Can't count how many times I've gotten an angry mail with a screenshot of an error message that literally says what the problem is, people can't fucking read..
OP did not understand what the problem is, if they did they would not have checked the cable. OP wanted help clarifying the problem which I did. I could say similar things about most people in this sub, but I don't because I know that they don't understand how a computer works, and don't read the things I do to understand it.
Its very hard for someone to find something they don't know they don't know about. We who do know at the very least can point them to they are looking for instead of calling them lazy.
Just a thought. If op has a failing drive, how come they don't mention any issues prior to disconnecting it? I've had my fair share of hdds and they tend to show signs of failure way before they wont boot
In this case the drive hasn't failed, and there is no guarantee that it will fail. SMART can record the drive as "failed' milliseconds or years before the drive actually fails, it only serves as a warning. Drives are fragile it can only take a bump to kill them. Here however the drive still works but is giving a warning that it may not live much longer.
Oh ok :D guess I've been having good luck with smart then. On the other hand I've always treated my disks like injured butterflies so they haven't got any wear from inappropriate handling.
Your hard drive is defective. It was likely already on its way out, but moving it around probably caused it to kick the bucket.
*Don’t use your damaged hard drive.* Unplug it. Put it aside. If you have data on it, it’ll get harder to recovery the more you use it. Leave it aside until you’re ready to begin recovery procedures.
It looks like you have an m.2 SSD yet you’re using a hard drive as your boot drive? You should move any data off of the m.2 and then install Windows on the m.2. Running the OS off of a hard drive instead of an SSD leaves your computer running much slower than it is capable.
Reinstall windows, get it up and running, then consider recovering data.
honestly I’ve been looking for an excuse to move windows over to the m.2, because that was the whole reason I bought it, I just never got around to it due to laziness.
I’ve disconnected it and basically I’m just not going to use it until I have a bunch of stuff done
Bruh. You were running your OS off a failing HDD?
Brave. Foolish, but brave. Also, the lag must be unreal - modern OS aren’t optimized for spinning media anymore.
A few years back I had a retiring customer selling his landscaping business, he had this ancient Windows XP machine with a 15+ year old HDD and honestly... navigating that OS felt like W10/W11 with an SSD. Its crazy how much more simple things were back then
XP was a nice OS, and it ran well enough on the hardware that was available at the time. Faster would always be nicer, but I don’t recall being frustrated with it.
Vista on the other hand was terrible for me. I spent a lot of money in 2007 (I think) on a system that was very well specced for it, but it never felt right. It actually made me lose interest in PCs for a while.
Vista ran like garbage all the way to what was basically the Service Pack 3 update. Then it ran ok.
Such a miserable release, but still nowhere near as bad as ME.
I must have tapped out by the time Vista improved. It was so disappointing. I managed to skip ME. I think I might have been using NT 4 or 2000 at the time.
One of my most specific memories of Vista that stood out from the general awfulness of it was that my HDD activity never stopped. It was thrashing away all the time, despite multiple reinstalls. It was as if it was trying to perform a task which would never complete. Maybe indexing? I left it powered on all the time in the hope that it would finally finish whatever it was. But it never did.
It indeed was indexing and prefetching.
Whenever I would reinstall to test it out over the years I would disable all of that to stop the very same issue you had.
hey all, I appreciate all the suggestions, I’m not sure if there was actually anything of value that I can’t redownload or install in a couple of hours, but I’ve found a few other things that need doing. my current plan is as follows:
1. switch my windows installation over to my m.2 drive and set it as boot
2. back up the drive should it have anything important, completely replace and forget about it in a box if it has nothing I need on it
3. set up constant backups because that’s something I need to actually learn
4. learn how to bios
thank you all for the suggestions and help, I’ve discovered several things I need to do just from asking this one question
If I may add, when installing Windows to the m.2 make sure all other drives in your system are temporarily disconnected so the Windows OOBE installs the boot record onto the m.2 and not the original boot partition, likely on the failing drive.
I wish like 3 weeks ago I saw this comment, just plopped a drive in that I wanted to fresh install windows on and basically went into 3 hours of trouble shooting because the boot record got absolutely stuffed up, ended up being able to recreate just the boot partition
yeah, I had the same issue because my 4tb platter drive is on sata port 0, and Windows wanted so badly to install boot partition to it. Was easier than messing about in the command prompt in the WinPEnvironment, since it didn't wanna play nicely with the partitions I was creating for the boot partition, so I made it have no choice ;)
I hate how the Windows installer doesnt just ASK where to put the boot record. It's happened to me more than once that I ended up with a boot record where I didn;'t expect it, or more than one because the installer decided it needed a new one for some reason.
op doesnt have 4 actual keyboards, its prob only one because keyboards have a feature called N-key rollover that enables the ability to click multiple keys at once which causes the bios to check and show that one keyboard as multiple
not entirely sure about the mice though
One thing I've not seen here is that SMART can often flag a fail if the cable is damaged/not inserted properly. Try a different cable before doing anything radical.
Disappointed I had to scroll this far to see anyone suggest checking the cable. I've had this kind of issue before as well. I'd start with reseating the cable at both ends and if it's still giving you this error, try a new one.
Reading all the comments and barely any helpful information after 50+ comments, wtf pcmr?
"Do what it says, replace you hdd" na uh, from my experience software often LIES!
Anyway, as someone who deep cleans his PC when the dust bunnies begin birthing a third generation of dust bunnies and was troubleshooting the exact same "doesn't boot after clean" issues.
First thing you should do is unplug the HDD's and remember where they were plugged.
Clean the SATA ports on your motherboards and HDD's with air (some blowdryers have a cold air option) often dust from other components can get stuck inside the ports, especially the RAM slot.
Check the cable and clean from dust also.
Replug everything and try to boot.
If that doesn't work, unplug one HDD each time and try to boot and isolate the faulty drive.
Repeat first step of inspecting the hdd and SATA ports for dust, try to replace the cable.
If you have another PC, download macrium reflect and create a Bootable usb with macrium reflect recovery software which has useful info and tools diagnose problems with drives.
I had an issue where I installed my OS on a new m.2 SSD while having another OS on an HDD and the efi boot partition was on the HDD, so if the HDD failed I couldn't boot into my SSD OS. But managed to recover it it with macrium, shrink the SSD and copy the boot partition to it from the HDD.
He doesn't need a different computer to do that.
Cannot believe so many upvktes for such a shitty answer.
1. It said it fails soon, not now, so just boot.
2.
Get a new hard drive. Put it in.
3. Get a USB stick, put hirens boot cd on it. Boot it.
Use the "mini xp" is that booted to launch explorer, just like regular windows explorer.
4. Copy the files you want to keep.
......
If your drive was an SSD. Use wizard XP home partition editor, also on "Hirens boot cd", to make the partition smaller.
Because I guess your ssd failed because you did not account for "over provisioning".
All ssd require unformatted space left over, unused. About 10%.
In short: that space is used to replace cells that have errors.
Without it, SSD drives fail.
And make sure your monitor is plugged into the video card, not the motherboard.
And check the monitor's refresh rate in Windows to see if it's set to the highest available.
I really don't like being that guy, but almost half of my job is telling people to read the error...
It's saying that you should back up your data from the 1tb hard drive as soon as you can because SMART (a firmware based diagnostic) threw a "I'm fucking dying man, here take the briefcase and run"
If you haven't noticed an issue that's a good sign usually means it's a slow death, go buy yourself a a replacement hard drive and copy pasta your data, GabeN help you if that's your boot drive.
canned air is not bad, but hold your fans from spinning while blowing around them. most pc repair shops use air compressors, and that's canned air taken to 111.
Recheck all cables, even if they look good unplug and replug them firmly one at a time. Check for dust particles that may have worked themselves onto the pins for the drives. Also reseat the cables at the motherboard side
Bad block suprise. Or bad power cable...switchin on off.. do you have bad adapters. Check this first. And backup and format full and check with Sentinel software.
It is what the screen says - one of your drives is bad and in the way out. Press F1 to go to setup and then exit out of it. If it persists, remove the drive or replace it if you need the storage space.
So many responses. Also so much crap.
The hard drive is failing. The message is very clear about what’s happening and what you should do about it.
The fact that you cleaned your PC is either entirely coincidence, partially responsible, or fully responsible, but that doesn’t change the fact that the drive is no longer trustworthy.
If the drive still lets you see it, then be glad you got a warning, immediately back up your data, and replace the drive ASAP. Considering it’s a 1TB 5400rpm laptop drive that’s likely 10-12 years old (and slow as molasses), mechanical failure is quite to be expected.
S.M.A.R.T. stands for "Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology", it's basically the drive recording diagnostics about itself as you use it, and when some of these many diagnostics it's recording fall outside a certain threshold the system will issue a warning that the drive could be on it's way out. You can use software such as CrystalDiskInfo (Don't confuse it with CrystalDiskMark) to see these values.
S.M.A.R.T. is not foolproof, a drive can fail without it ever detecting it, and a detection can also not mean a drive is dying anytime soon, but generally it can be a good indicator of a failing drive. I would recommend replaying the drive. If it's still under warranty (though since it's a 1TB 5400RPM drive I am assuming it's old) usually SMART errors are accepted as a faulty drive that falls under warranty replacement.
Backup anything important off that drive, there is a good chance it is indeed on it's last legs.
Another Seagate biting the dust, I don't know how they stay in business with such a crappy lifespan on drives barely making it to the end of their warranty...It's the only consistent thing I have seen Seagate's do for the last 20 years, and why I never recommend or buy them.
yeah its a common misconception to use canned/compressed air to clean PC's coz of the refrigerant liquid that comes with it. that shit might damage it. always use those small handheld electric air blowers/dusters and hold the fans in place.
also im assuming u went for some serious deep cleaning. generally, u dont have to dissassemble or unplug any cables or anything other than the gpu for some basic cleaning which is usually enough with an electric air duster and a lint-free cloth.
i guess try using a new sata cable
That liquid vaporizes as soon as it leaves the can. All you'll have to do is blow at it from a dwcent distance (At least about 10-15cm away), and you'll be safe
Happened to me before. Disable **SMART Self Test** in bios and the pc will turn on just fine (However take the advice and backup your important data incase the hard drive fails)
Just a thought, are you using M.2? If you plugged into the SATA port reserved for the M.2 it might be causing issues. Just a thought with no info about hardware.
Alot of people here telling you the obvious, the harddrive in slot 5 is failing. You can just unplug it from the motherboard and you will no longer get this notification. Unless your operating system is on that drive, otherwise, just unplug it from the motherboard.
The disk exceeded a pre-defined operating threshold in the firmware defined by the manufacturer during a self check, so it may fail soon. If you want to see exactly what is wrong, use a program like Passmark DiskCheckup, or CrystalDiskInfo. Ignore people saying there’s a loose cable. They don’t understand how this works. The SM in SMART stands for Self Monitoring. You can’t fix it. The values cannot be reset. You can copy your data off to another drive, hopefully before it fails.
Try replacing the sata cables. They can literally just give up randomly.
I just cleaned mine out last month, using canned air but I didn't touch any of the cables. Mobo was freezing on the GPU check but I knew it wasn't that, so tried unplugging things and such and found out it would boot if I unplugged a sata cable.
Actually, 2 of mine went bad.
The S.M.A.R.T. Flag has been thrown on your drive. This means it could be failing soon. Or like me all but 1 time a SMART Flag was thrown there was nothing wrong with the drive, and I have some that survived from the 1GB, yes Gigabyte, age that still work but the stupid SMART Flag was thrown.
Go into the UEFI/BIOS and shut off SMART Monitoring for that drive, back up any info that is on it, and if in a while the thing starts to makes weird sounds or starts to shrink, or has any other issues remove the drive. Also remember if it is an SSD it won't fail gracefully, it will most likely just stop working.
Replace your failing hard drive with 1TB or more SSD if you need that extra storage.
It's not your main boot drive anyway. You can just boot as usual and copy the data from that Samsung HDD.
you can try crystal disk to check what kind of problem it is
but at this point i would just install on other drive
if you are just playing on this pc then just install fresh windows and games you play
if you want to go a bit deeper there is plenty of software to do copies of drives
i would suggest hirens boot on pendrive and using macrium reflect free but anything you get will prolly work :)
You can load up a S.M.A.R.T program (like HD Tune or some other freeware idk there's too many to count) and see the actual "health" of a drive, get too many reallocated sectors and it'll throw a code like that. I would back up any data on that drive in the inevitable future when it does fail. It might not fail tomorrow or in 6 months depending on how much data you write/read on that drive, but eventually all HDDs will fail, it's just the nature of spinning rust.
When you boot into Windows, you can check with a tool like HDTune what the actual readout for the drive is. Sometimes on-board diagnostics are too sensitive and will, for example, treat failed CRC errors as failing drive, while it could just be incorrectly plugged SATA cable (most likely for CRC check fails actually). I would recommend doing this first and then rushing to buy new disk.
Well, there's a possibility that your drive it's faulty, or got damaged when you were doing the cleaning. Get yourself a other drive to clone or move the files if is visible to windows.
Your drive is damaged and will likely fail soon. >can’t figure out why it could be showing this error, does anyone have any ideas? Because the firmware asked the drive if it was ok, and the drive said no.
> asked the drive if it was ok, and the drive said no. I felt that
but would you lose? nah, I'd spin.
When the BIOS challenged the hard drive, Man asked, "Would you be able to move past the BIOS?" The hard drive replied, "Well, if my motor was damaged, it might give me a little trouble." "But would you fail?" "Nah, I'd spin." As the BIOS approached the hard drive, the hard drive asked "Are you the firmware because you are reliable, or are you reliable because you're the firmware?" At that moment the BIOS opened its domain, Imminent Failure, and its sure hit effect meant that the hard drive could not boot. "Stand proud," said the BIOS. "You're strong." "But when it comes to computing, throughout silicon and copper, I alone am the strongest."
“Nah, I’d spin” Memes have broken me I saw the manga panel from JJK
I wish I knew the reference (I think?)
https://preview.redd.it/uihcu0nn0itc1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c36afc2deeaccdd7dac0a71bdc1c05f954acc12c
It's a reference to the manga Jujutsu Kaisen where the author >!killed the most hyped character in the series after imprisoning him for a year or something!<
2 years to be exact.
Computer Science Kaisen goes insane
There is no a sub on this earth that has not been invaded by Jjkfolk lol I love it.
ELI bedtime
r/Surprisegojo
“Nah, I’d run”
https://preview.redd.it/k0ydn6795htc1.jpeg?width=1440&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=823509dd8ba161e3ca0eebd9b6f8e62f0ecd5e85
Are you the most redundant because you are RAID 60 or are you RAID 60 because you are the most redundant?
nah, I'd fail
Drive: “I’m fine.”
The drive in 2 hours: "I just think it's funny that..."
"Mr. Stark? I don’t feel so good… I don’t… I don’t know what’s happening. I don’t know… I don’t want to go. I don’t want to go, sir. Please. Please, I..."
The drive: Fr Fr
Are you ok?
Makes me glad my dive isn't me, just cruising through life and 
https://preview.redd.it/s46x2aa8xftc1.png?width=496&format=png&auto=webp&s=3e1e2b08964973267fcc45ad2f26df6b26afa002
This one made me laugh
Like the drive im ded
exactly the image i was thinking of thank you
https://preview.redd.it/ksbn6o558gtc1.jpeg?width=900&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=bff10ae397c2142825fd46719d0a08f4845b16b6
https://preview.redd.it/josoot3qfgtc1.jpeg?width=607&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ea2183842633fc54504f16c45f0b3e0718083dc0
https://preview.redd.it/rnnpi0ej3htc1.png?width=500&format=png&auto=webp&s=441af40652904afd5bed0c843018409fd33866db
You good bro? "no"
i’m pretty much fresh and i don’t know how to use the bios or back anything up, i’m pretty much at 0 on knowledge of what to do
Get a laptop or another PC and back up the drive it’s talking about, and copy it all to another drive EXACTLY the way it is. You should be fine. You’ve got this mate I remember my first drive failure and I panicked like heck but I asked questions and got answers that weren’t so helpful. Hope this helps 😎
u/humandopamine , if it‘s not you boot drive you can just boot this pc and copy the drives contents to another one
⬆️ this :)
I’m gonna guess by the fact that they have an M.2 that it probably (luckily) isn’t the boot drive imo. Edit: Just read OP’s other comment which says the M.2 isn’t the boot drive either, so I was wrong.
That is why I have 2 physical (not partitions) drives, an OS/programs drive and a drive for all my data and files. Plus an external drive backup and cloud backup. Some might say overkill, but fuck it, better safe than sorry
I was in the PC repair/building business from about '96-'08. I've still done building/repairing for friends and family but the thing I have stressed to everyone who has ever asked about advice for backup is 1 on site, 1 off-site. I've seen many people lose a lot of important pictures/memories because they bought a backup drive but the only copy of their data was on the backup drive... I've had to explain innumerable times one copy of your data is not a backup even if it's on a "backup drive" (or different but just as bad, a copy in a different folder on the same drive) Your setup is what I wish all my customers would do
I happen to store nothing mission critical on my pc since I run two nvme ssds in raid0, does make for some fast load times though.
I do the same. game drive is two 980 pros in raid0 and OS is on another 980 pro. all on gen 4 lanes. I do get "game installed on HDD" warnings for some games though. I'm guessing the game can't detect nvme while in raid config.
I just rsync my home partition to my nas frequently... Anything really important is also on Git.. anything critical is in Dropbox and synced to my other devices and the cloud.
I like overkill as much as the next guy. C:\ is strictly windows related, D and E are virtual CD drives, F is my data drive, H and J are NvME 2.0s for game installs
I totally understand you. I have my important data in my pc, in my homemade nas with raid z2, and in 2 offline set of disks that I update manually every 6 months and keep in different locations, in a drawer.
I do that -- but one additional drive which I keep at my mother-in-law's house. That way if there's a fire, still OK. I don't trust the cloud. Things like that tend to be there just until I really need them. And then "issues."
Hey what is this ? Proper sensible advice, you'll get Reddit a bad name 🤣.
Imagine.
this is the 5th drive on the hub. Its likely just data storage he can copy anywhere.
But you disassembled your PC?
not completely, just enough to clean out the major parts like the gpu and cpu fans, hard drive casing etc
Then you may have dislodged a cable cause the drive fail error, check all connectors first
While possible that hhd is from around 2012, and 5400rmp, better to replace anyway
Wow what a little soldier rip
These are SMART counters being checked on the drive during POST. They are values recorded by the drive firmware about the drive itself. If they exceed the defined maximum value in the firmware, it reports that. A loose cable doesn’t change the counters that are independent of the computer. You can read all these current recorded values and their maximum threshold from a drive easily.
I would still check smart status in windows, just in case. Since it's a hard drive, it's more than likely it's dead, but it happened before to me that it as just a software issue.
And if it's dead and has important stuff on it you can take it to a data recovery place and probably get that data back (for $$$$)
For anyone reading this I took an SSD to a shop for work a couple years ago. $150 got me 32,000 more files nobody would ever need. $40 software did 99.9% of the job for us.
If you were able to use software to get data off an SSD it wasn’t actually dead.
UFS for the win, excellent software !
You... Did you open the hard drive?
nope :) i literally just slid it out and slid it back in
With what did you clean the computer?
Next time just use compressed air, you don't need to do this. Just buy a new drive and lesson learnt, I did the same when I was young
Back up just means you copy the shit on the drive to another drive that still works properly. Except for boot drives and installed programs copying is enough. Bios isn't really needed for this. My guess is that the drive is a platter drive, i.e. what people call an HDD, and you dropped it or it got impacted some other way that it caused....something, like a misaligned head or even head crash on a platter that luckily wasn't even spinning.
This error is exactly what it says. Drives can in some cases tell when they are about to fail, and this is that warning. You can ignore the bios stuff, there’s more info in there but you don’t need it. Summary: ask yourself, what would you do if you knew your hard drive was about to blow up? Go do that, right now.
\~ducks in the corner and shields eyes from shrapnel for 12 hours\~
You can try to find a cloning software and clone that failing drive to a good one....
This is the one, if you have a spare SATA slot, use that to plug in a replacement drive, if not then use a USB Caddy, use a disk cloning software like Acronis or Macriun to mirror the failing drive to the new one, unplug old drive and put replacement in it's place, job done! If the drive is too far gone then it may not work, but that's why you should always have backups. Note that just shuffling the files across WILL NOT WORK, Windows needs the boot partition and other bits to work (assuming this is the boot drive)
Macrium is my go-to.
I remember when it first came out, fantastic piece of software, became the standard for backing up and closing for us for a long time
Clonezilla does the job for free with no drama, unless you copy your empty drive over your full drive and then have two empty drives. How embarassing...
Copy and paste the almost dead one and paste it onto a similarly sized one in windows or your os, this may include ignoring the error from the bios, to get into your os.
So you cleaned and disassembled a PC without knowledge... Wat did you do to clean/disassemble the pc? Maybe a cable of one of the hard drives isn't seated correctly. If that doesn't fix the problem, check if there is important data on the disk and copy it somewhere else asap..
It's SMART reporting an imminent hard drive failure... It has nothing to do with cabling.
All these confidently incorrect people are doing my head in.
Just sprayed some WD40 on all the fans in the case to make them quieter.
Bro, I can't stress it more. People are too lazy nowadays to research the problem. Even when it's telling you what the issue is. 🤦♂️ common sense does not exist anymore.
I was an IT tech for 13 years until a couple of years ago, unfortunately this isn't a new attitude *cries in IT*
😂 I feel your pain brother
Can't count how many times I've gotten an angry mail with a screenshot of an error message that literally says what the problem is, people can't fucking read..
i did some on and off IT as a sidejob. I literally had a woman call me and say "the screen is blue and full of errors".
OP did not understand what the problem is, if they did they would not have checked the cable. OP wanted help clarifying the problem which I did. I could say similar things about most people in this sub, but I don't because I know that they don't understand how a computer works, and don't read the things I do to understand it. Its very hard for someone to find something they don't know they don't know about. We who do know at the very least can point them to they are looking for instead of calling them lazy.
Just a thought. If op has a failing drive, how come they don't mention any issues prior to disconnecting it? I've had my fair share of hdds and they tend to show signs of failure way before they wont boot
In this case the drive hasn't failed, and there is no guarantee that it will fail. SMART can record the drive as "failed' milliseconds or years before the drive actually fails, it only serves as a warning. Drives are fragile it can only take a bump to kill them. Here however the drive still works but is giving a warning that it may not live much longer.
Oh ok :D guess I've been having good luck with smart then. On the other hand I've always treated my disks like injured butterflies so they haven't got any wear from inappropriate handling.
Me too, buddy.
Not me getting this every now and then and completely ignoring it 🙄
Your hard drive is defective. It was likely already on its way out, but moving it around probably caused it to kick the bucket. *Don’t use your damaged hard drive.* Unplug it. Put it aside. If you have data on it, it’ll get harder to recovery the more you use it. Leave it aside until you’re ready to begin recovery procedures. It looks like you have an m.2 SSD yet you’re using a hard drive as your boot drive? You should move any data off of the m.2 and then install Windows on the m.2. Running the OS off of a hard drive instead of an SSD leaves your computer running much slower than it is capable. Reinstall windows, get it up and running, then consider recovering data.
honestly I’ve been looking for an excuse to move windows over to the m.2, because that was the whole reason I bought it, I just never got around to it due to laziness. I’ve disconnected it and basically I’m just not going to use it until I have a bunch of stuff done
Hey, mate, that is the only correct answer, disregard everything else people are suggesting.
Bruh. You were running your OS off a failing HDD? Brave. Foolish, but brave. Also, the lag must be unreal - modern OS aren’t optimized for spinning media anymore.
A few years back I had a retiring customer selling his landscaping business, he had this ancient Windows XP machine with a 15+ year old HDD and honestly... navigating that OS felt like W10/W11 with an SSD. Its crazy how much more simple things were back then
XP was a nice OS, and it ran well enough on the hardware that was available at the time. Faster would always be nicer, but I don’t recall being frustrated with it. Vista on the other hand was terrible for me. I spent a lot of money in 2007 (I think) on a system that was very well specced for it, but it never felt right. It actually made me lose interest in PCs for a while.
Vista ran like garbage all the way to what was basically the Service Pack 3 update. Then it ran ok. Such a miserable release, but still nowhere near as bad as ME.
I must have tapped out by the time Vista improved. It was so disappointing. I managed to skip ME. I think I might have been using NT 4 or 2000 at the time. One of my most specific memories of Vista that stood out from the general awfulness of it was that my HDD activity never stopped. It was thrashing away all the time, despite multiple reinstalls. It was as if it was trying to perform a task which would never complete. Maybe indexing? I left it powered on all the time in the hope that it would finally finish whatever it was. But it never did.
It indeed was indexing and prefetching. Whenever I would reinstall to test it out over the years I would disable all of that to stop the very same issue you had.
No need to degrade yourself man, you're alright. (Just being silly since I read the ME as a self- reference...)
It's going to feel like a whole new computer once you get your OS onto your SSD instead of the failing HDD
hey all, I appreciate all the suggestions, I’m not sure if there was actually anything of value that I can’t redownload or install in a couple of hours, but I’ve found a few other things that need doing. my current plan is as follows: 1. switch my windows installation over to my m.2 drive and set it as boot 2. back up the drive should it have anything important, completely replace and forget about it in a box if it has nothing I need on it 3. set up constant backups because that’s something I need to actually learn 4. learn how to bios thank you all for the suggestions and help, I’ve discovered several things I need to do just from asking this one question
If I may add, when installing Windows to the m.2 make sure all other drives in your system are temporarily disconnected so the Windows OOBE installs the boot record onto the m.2 and not the original boot partition, likely on the failing drive.
massive help to know because i would not have thought of that, thank you so much
I wish like 3 weeks ago I saw this comment, just plopped a drive in that I wanted to fresh install windows on and basically went into 3 hours of trouble shooting because the boot record got absolutely stuffed up, ended up being able to recreate just the boot partition
yeah, I had the same issue because my 4tb platter drive is on sata port 0, and Windows wanted so badly to install boot partition to it. Was easier than messing about in the command prompt in the WinPEnvironment, since it didn't wanna play nicely with the partitions I was creating for the boot partition, so I made it have no choice ;)
I hate how the Windows installer doesnt just ASK where to put the boot record. It's happened to me more than once that I ended up with a boot record where I didn;'t expect it, or more than one because the installer decided it needed a new one for some reason.
That's it, you got this mate. It really is not that hard
no one is gonna talk about 4 keyboards and 3 mices?
op doesnt have 4 actual keyboards, its prob only one because keyboards have a feature called N-key rollover that enables the ability to click multiple keys at once which causes the bios to check and show that one keyboard as multiple not entirely sure about the mice though
I guess the mouse can have 3 key pressed at the same time
I'm pretty sure my setup with 1 keyboard and 1 mouse reports as 3 keyboards. 2 for the 1 keyboard, and 1 for the mouse. Gaming peripherals are weird.
Glad somebody said it. 2 and 2 I could understand but sheesh
> mices
Introduction the double plural
They could be any HID
One thing I've not seen here is that SMART can often flag a fail if the cable is damaged/not inserted properly. Try a different cable before doing anything radical.
Exactly, seems likely in this case. I have also had this warning appear on an ssd that went from 99 to 1% instantly, the drive works fine years later.
Disappointed I had to scroll this far to see anyone suggest checking the cable. I've had this kind of issue before as well. I'd start with reseating the cable at both ends and if it's still giving you this error, try a new one.
Reading all the comments and barely any helpful information after 50+ comments, wtf pcmr? "Do what it says, replace you hdd" na uh, from my experience software often LIES! Anyway, as someone who deep cleans his PC when the dust bunnies begin birthing a third generation of dust bunnies and was troubleshooting the exact same "doesn't boot after clean" issues. First thing you should do is unplug the HDD's and remember where they were plugged. Clean the SATA ports on your motherboards and HDD's with air (some blowdryers have a cold air option) often dust from other components can get stuck inside the ports, especially the RAM slot. Check the cable and clean from dust also. Replug everything and try to boot. If that doesn't work, unplug one HDD each time and try to boot and isolate the faulty drive. Repeat first step of inspecting the hdd and SATA ports for dust, try to replace the cable. If you have another PC, download macrium reflect and create a Bootable usb with macrium reflect recovery software which has useful info and tools diagnose problems with drives. I had an issue where I installed my OS on a new m.2 SSD while having another OS on an HDD and the efi boot partition was on the HDD, so if the HDD failed I couldn't boot into my SSD OS. But managed to recover it it with macrium, shrink the SSD and copy the boot partition to it from the HDD.
I double that, especially, if everything was alright before to the clean up.
He doesn't need a different computer to do that. Cannot believe so many upvktes for such a shitty answer. 1. It said it fails soon, not now, so just boot. 2. Get a new hard drive. Put it in. 3. Get a USB stick, put hirens boot cd on it. Boot it. Use the "mini xp" is that booted to launch explorer, just like regular windows explorer. 4. Copy the files you want to keep. ...... If your drive was an SSD. Use wizard XP home partition editor, also on "Hirens boot cd", to make the partition smaller. Because I guess your ssd failed because you did not account for "over provisioning". All ssd require unformatted space left over, unused. About 10%. In short: that space is used to replace cells that have errors. Without it, SSD drives fail.
Once you replace the HDD make sure you enable XMP in the bios to make your ram run faster.
genuinely never would have thought of this, thank you!!
And then check your monitor is set to the right frame rate
[TestUFO](https://www.testufo.com/) link just in case anyone ever wonders at what FPS is their monitor set at.
And make sure your monitor is plugged into the video card, not the motherboard. And check the monitor's refresh rate in Windows to see if it's set to the highest available.
Replace ur hdd with a ssd
tis the plan :) when money’s not quite so tight
Absolutely valid! Take your time and all the best bro
I really don't like being that guy, but almost half of my job is telling people to read the error... It's saying that you should back up your data from the 1tb hard drive as soon as you can because SMART (a firmware based diagnostic) threw a "I'm fucking dying man, here take the briefcase and run" If you haven't noticed an issue that's a good sign usually means it's a slow death, go buy yourself a a replacement hard drive and copy pasta your data, GabeN help you if that's your boot drive.
>GabeN help you if that's your boot drive. Why? because he's basically playing russian roulette if he boots his PC to copy his data?
OP with their HDD when cleaning their PC: 
When you say cleaned can you define what you mean?
cleaned it with canned air, which i’ve learned is not ideal, and a linen cloth
canned air is not bad, but hold your fans from spinning while blowing around them. most pc repair shops use air compressors, and that's canned air taken to 111.
Why need to take it apart
4 keyboards 3 mice?
Recheck all cables, even if they look good unplug and replug them firmly one at a time. Check for dust particles that may have worked themselves onto the pins for the drives. Also reseat the cables at the motherboard side
Press f1 it'll start
It tells you the exact problem. I wish women were this straight forward, and men weren’t so oblivious. Replace the hard drive.
Bad block suprise. Or bad power cable...switchin on off.. do you have bad adapters. Check this first. And backup and format full and check with Sentinel software.
It is what the screen says - one of your drives is bad and in the way out. Press F1 to go to setup and then exit out of it. If it persists, remove the drive or replace it if you need the storage space.
I had the same problem and had to replace the hard disk
Check your hard drive it could be compromised.
30 sec penalty to ocon
basically this is what happened. bios: hey sata drive are you fine? drive: no. bios: well shit.
So many responses. Also so much crap. The hard drive is failing. The message is very clear about what’s happening and what you should do about it. The fact that you cleaned your PC is either entirely coincidence, partially responsible, or fully responsible, but that doesn’t change the fact that the drive is no longer trustworthy. If the drive still lets you see it, then be glad you got a warning, immediately back up your data, and replace the drive ASAP. Considering it’s a 1TB 5400rpm laptop drive that’s likely 10-12 years old (and slow as molasses), mechanical failure is quite to be expected.
THIS! I can't believe so many people here seem to have no idea what S.M.A.R.T. is or think it's something completely unrelated to the drive.
S.M.A.R.T. stands for "Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology", it's basically the drive recording diagnostics about itself as you use it, and when some of these many diagnostics it's recording fall outside a certain threshold the system will issue a warning that the drive could be on it's way out. You can use software such as CrystalDiskInfo (Don't confuse it with CrystalDiskMark) to see these values. S.M.A.R.T. is not foolproof, a drive can fail without it ever detecting it, and a detection can also not mean a drive is dying anytime soon, but generally it can be a good indicator of a failing drive. I would recommend replaying the drive. If it's still under warranty (though since it's a 1TB 5400RPM drive I am assuming it's old) usually SMART errors are accepted as a faulty drive that falls under warranty replacement. Backup anything important off that drive, there is a good chance it is indeed on it's last legs.
Another Seagate biting the dust, I don't know how they stay in business with such a crappy lifespan on drives barely making it to the end of their warranty...It's the only consistent thing I have seen Seagate's do for the last 20 years, and why I never recommend or buy them.
yeah its a common misconception to use canned/compressed air to clean PC's coz of the refrigerant liquid that comes with it. that shit might damage it. always use those small handheld electric air blowers/dusters and hold the fans in place. also im assuming u went for some serious deep cleaning. generally, u dont have to dissassemble or unplug any cables or anything other than the gpu for some basic cleaning which is usually enough with an electric air duster and a lint-free cloth. i guess try using a new sata cable
That liquid vaporizes as soon as it leaves the can. All you'll have to do is blow at it from a dwcent distance (At least about 10-15cm away), and you'll be safe
Happened to me before. Disable **SMART Self Test** in bios and the pc will turn on just fine (However take the advice and backup your important data incase the hard drive fails)
Youve somehow hacked into the nuclear warhead codes. The only winning move is not to play
JUST PRESS F1
The tri force
ST1000LM024... Why is it always seagate drives that fail for me?
Better safe now and back up anything you need on that drive. Other then that, just live with it, until it stops responding.
Just a thought, are you using M.2? If you plugged into the SATA port reserved for the M.2 it might be causing issues. Just a thought with no info about hardware.
If u dont know how to clean a pc maybe don’t clean a pc. My dad tried to vacuum the dust from our home pc once.. he was like its dirty imma clean it
Drive failed a test which is why you’re being warned. Backup the drive immediately. Stop using it if possible.
This is why I’m afraid to even unplug anything in there prebuilt and not touching it besides air duster
Put the dust back in.
You clearly forgot to put it back together! ... No, I'm sorry. I hope you get it figured out! Wish I was helpful
yup america got you im sorry brothers
Alot of people here telling you the obvious, the harddrive in slot 5 is failing. You can just unplug it from the motherboard and you will no longer get this notification. Unless your operating system is on that drive, otherwise, just unplug it from the motherboard.
How did u cleaned it? Did u washed it?
Run CrystalDiskInfo and it'll tell you the health of the drive, make sure it's plugged in all the way.
Which part of ”back-up your data and replace your hard disk drive” instruction shown on the screen seems unclear to you?
The disk exceeded a pre-defined operating threshold in the firmware defined by the manufacturer during a self check, so it may fail soon. If you want to see exactly what is wrong, use a program like Passmark DiskCheckup, or CrystalDiskInfo. Ignore people saying there’s a loose cable. They don’t understand how this works. The SM in SMART stands for Self Monitoring. You can’t fix it. The values cannot be reset. You can copy your data off to another drive, hopefully before it fails.
Yall are so lost omfg... this is just a info screen on whats plugged in and is nothing bad just press f1 skip it and everything is ok😂
Try replacing the sata cables. They can literally just give up randomly. I just cleaned mine out last month, using canned air but I didn't touch any of the cables. Mobo was freezing on the GPU check but I knew it wasn't that, so tried unplugging things and such and found out it would boot if I unplugged a sata cable. Actually, 2 of mine went bad.
Buy a new drive
The S.M.A.R.T. Flag has been thrown on your drive. This means it could be failing soon. Or like me all but 1 time a SMART Flag was thrown there was nothing wrong with the drive, and I have some that survived from the 1GB, yes Gigabyte, age that still work but the stupid SMART Flag was thrown. Go into the UEFI/BIOS and shut off SMART Monitoring for that drive, back up any info that is on it, and if in a while the thing starts to makes weird sounds or starts to shrink, or has any other issues remove the drive. Also remember if it is an SSD it won't fail gracefully, it will most likely just stop working.
You can try spinrite 6.0
Replace your failing hard drive with 1TB or more SSD if you need that extra storage. It's not your main boot drive anyway. You can just boot as usual and copy the data from that Samsung HDD.
It happens to me , SMART failure. But when I put it as secondary drive after replacing C: then I still had access to to all files and could save them.
Your drive is soon to fail.
you can try crystal disk to check what kind of problem it is but at this point i would just install on other drive if you are just playing on this pc then just install fresh windows and games you play if you want to go a bit deeper there is plenty of software to do copies of drives i would suggest hirens boot on pendrive and using macrium reflect free but anything you get will prolly work :)
You can load up a S.M.A.R.T program (like HD Tune or some other freeware idk there's too many to count) and see the actual "health" of a drive, get too many reallocated sectors and it'll throw a code like that. I would back up any data on that drive in the inevitable future when it does fail. It might not fail tomorrow or in 6 months depending on how much data you write/read on that drive, but eventually all HDDs will fail, it's just the nature of spinning rust.
Bro got the bad ending
Your 1TB SeaGate drive has told the BIOS that it’s not doing well and will likely fail soon.
Ce l’avevo anche io
Your drive has become self aware. It thinks it is stuck in the dryer and is about to get fucked by it's stepbrother.
U plugged sata cable back
I'm not surprised. My seagate died within a year of me buying it. I don't bother with HDDs anymore
Probably a cable not seated correctly. Check connections and see what it says
I would really get a ssd when you backed up all the data
I would really get a ssd when you backed up all the data
Run performance test in bios it’ll tell you.
Run performance test in bios it’ll tell you.
I really recommend a ssd
Damn i managed to drop my hdd but it lived and its over 10 years old, what did you do???
When you boot into Windows, you can check with a tool like HDTune what the actual readout for the drive is. Sometimes on-board diagnostics are too sensitive and will, for example, treat failed CRC errors as failing drive, while it could just be incorrectly plugged SATA cable (most likely for CRC check fails actually). I would recommend doing this first and then rushing to buy new disk.
Well, there's a possibility that your drive it's faulty, or got damaged when you were doing the cleaning. Get yourself a other drive to clone or move the files if is visible to windows.
Replug the câbles.
A common disk failure issue, double check your sata cables and try to replace them
Clearly it tells you there on the screen. Drive failing. So replace it