Possible hard drive failure?

[DrAsik]

When I got back from college today I was told the computer had locked up during the day and nobody knew how to fix it.
See, I'm kinda the tech guy here.

What was happening is:

- There was a remnant of web page freezed in the middle of the screen, but I could bring it down using the task manager.
- Sound was disabled. The computer would beep whenever sound was needed.

I tried to reboot it normally, but it wouldn't shut down. So I did a manual reboot.

I was greeted on the POST screen by WARNING: HARD DRIVE FAILURE IMMINENT. BACK UP ALL YOUR DATA BLABLABLA.

So I turned it off and then back trying to figure out if the HD was making any weird noise or being too hot. No, it's normal. But I get that menacing warning again. I hit F1 and proceed to load Windows. Everything behaves normally, sound works. I download Active SMART and DiskCheckup which both tell me, based on SMART data, that the Hard Drive is in perfect health; temperature is about 40 degrees Celcius.

I then restart again, this time it restarts normally. This time I don't get the warning.

So basically everything's "back to normal".

What do you think? Should I rush out and buy a new HD?

 

[DrAsik]

By the way it's a Western Digital Caviar WD800JB, 80GB.

 

[vacunita]

I would, just to be cautious, backup everything important immediately. You can then wait it out and see if something happens, but if it does you'll have your data intact.

Also going to the Western Digital site and downloading their diagnostics tool, would be a good idea.

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Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.