PCTech Forums

My hard drive recently crashed. It started clicking and then upon reboot gave me a message that "Hard Drive Failure is Imminent". Then I got a Boot Failure and it would not even boot up anymore. Well, I bought a new hard drive, installed it and the same "Hard Drive Failure is Imminent" message appeared. I put in a XP CD, and booted from there to install windows. When I began the format, it hanged at 1%. I tried to again and it did the same thing. Is this hard drive defective too??? Can someone help me, I am at my wits end!

thats a really messed up ordeal. Clicking is a pretty good sign that your hard drive converted itself into a paper weight. The new drive could be questionable, it is always possible to buy a bad drive. It doesnt happen often but it does indeed happen. It sounds like these are both S.M.A.R.T enabled drives and the first thing i would do is clear the CMOS on your motherboard and try the new drive again. If that doesnt work you may consider disabling "smart" and trying again. If neither of those succeed, i would suggest returning the drive for another one.

heres an example


Keep in mind that not all motherboards are the same so yours may not look exactly like this. The cmos jumper is usually located next to the battery and you can indeed use needle nose pliers if its hard to get to. Notice that the jumper is on 2 out of 3 pins. What you will do is, with the machine off, remove the jumper from pins 1 and 2 and place it on pins 2 and 3. Wait 10 seconds and return the jumper back to pins 1 and 2. Power the machine back on and you should receive a message that defaults have been loaded, and you will be asked to press something like F1 to continue and something else to enter setup. These keys vary from board to board to i apologize for being vague. Press whatever is needed to continue and hope that fixed your hard drive issue.