SMART Hard Disk Error - HP detected an imminent failure: HP Laptop

[Camillejnae]

My mom's 4 year old HP laptop (I don't have the make and model as of yet, will add to post when I receive from her) running Windows 7 64bit, that she uses for school and internet surfing has just turned up an error message about her hard drive, seemingly out of nowhere. She has not dropped it or moved it from her office and has not downloaded anything funky from the internet.

The specific error message is: "SMART check Failure ID: UBUD7L-59K698-XD003F-609M03: Immediate Steps, Because a disk failure will cause you to loose all of your programs you should back up all your important information immediately and have the hard disk in question reoaired or replaced"

 "Which disk is failing? The following hard disk is reporting failure: Disk name: TOSHIBA MK6465GSX ATA device Volume: C:\; D:\; F:\"

See attached pics.

Does she need a new hard disk at this point? Is this a virus? I have backing up all her info to Carbonite and to an external Hard Drive as a precaution. What could have happened to cause this?

Any assistnace would be appreciated, thank you.

[Paul_Tikkanen · Accepted solution]

Hi:

Yes, the hard drive has failed and needs to be replaced.

It is just naming all of the partitions on the one hard drive.

Hard to say why. Most likely reason is heat.

4 years isn't bad for a notebook hard drive. I read many forum member's posts where the hard drives have gone out much sooner than that.

It is not a matter of if a hard drive will fail, but a matter of when.

Do you have recovery disks to restore the operating system on a new hard drive?

Paul

[Camillejnae]

I was afraid of that - but I figured. As you know new computers don't tend to come with recovery disks these days, so I'm checking with her to see if she has any but she can just order from HP right?

Thank you for your input.

[Paul_Tikkanen]

You're very welcome.

You should be able to order recovery media by reading the info at the link below...

http://support.hp.com/us-en/document/bph07143

You can also make your own W7 installation media if you can read all 25 characters of the windows 7 product key on the bottom of the notebook.

Here's how...

If you can read the 25 character Microsoft windows 7 product key, you can download plain Windows 7 ISO files to burn to a DVD for the version of windows that came installed on your PC, and that is listed on the Microsoft COA sticker on your PC's case.

Burn the ISO using the Burn ISO option on your DVD burning program and burn at the slowest possible speed your program will allow. This will create a bootable DVD.

Or use the Windows 7 USB/DVD installation tool to compile the ISO file you download from Digital River. Link and instructions below. You need a 4 GB flash drive to use the USB method of compilation.

http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msstore/html/pbPage.Help_Win7_usbdvd_dwnTool

Use the 25 character product key on the PC to activate the installation.

The key will activate either a 32 or 64 bit installation.

Then go to the PC's support and driver page to install the drivers you need.

Link to the W7 ISO file downloads is below.

http://www.mydigitallife.info/official-windows-7-sp1-iso-from-digital-river/

Paul

[Camillejnae]

Thanks!