My system has recently become unstable with long pauses during bootup, along with erratic behaviour when accessing programs. For some time now I’ve suspected that all is not well with my WD800JB Hard Drive, and although WD’s own diagnostic utility gives the drive a clean bill of health, I think it’s suffering with a terminal disease. I’ve been running HDD Health for a while now, and it’s been reporting frequent seek rate errors but reports the drive as being healthy. AIDA test says nothing wrong either, but I’m a bit confused because last night during bootup P.O.S.T, I got a SMART message saying that Hard Drive failure was imminent and that I should back up the drive immediately. I’ve never had a drive fail on me before, but it looks like this one’s on the way out. Why the conflicting information though? The drive is either sick or it isn’t.

What WD tool did you test the drive with? is it DLG diagnostics or a windows variation of the utility. You want to make sure you run the DOS version and perform an extended test. It may take a while if you have a big drive, but you will get a better and more accurate result. Whom are you on computing.net?

Hello Sabertooth, I did use the DOS version of WD Diag. and I ran both the fast and full tests. Results OK. Regards, Bluedog.

Hi Bluedog: It's always a good idea to do a backup of you drive. Never wait till you have a drive fail then it's too late or expensive to send to a data recovery service business. I believe you should be able to use an external USB2 hard drive case, add a large enough HD to the case & copy entire drive. Then if your HD fail it should be easier to remove the external HD & replace your master HD, then use Win XP CD (set boot to CD in bios) to re-install or maybe repair replacement HD. Good luck, Z