Viao hard drive problem (I think)

singist · 24 Mar 2006 at 12:19

A friend just rang to say that his Sony Viao desktop (4 years old) appears to have gone boobs up; I've never come across the sort of thing he's describing so I don't know if it's some sort of HD monitoring thing or a virus of some kind or even something else.

Switch on and get to black screen where hds are recognised but at the bottom it says something along the lines of .....

"WARNING! your hard drive appears to be failing, back up immediately and replace your hard drive. Press F1 to continue or F2 to go to Setup"

He's tried going into BIOS and setting back to defaults and also just continuing the boot but gets to his desktop wallpaper without any other stuff (icons) at all.

Anyone got any brainy ideas? ..... before I have to go over to his place and replace the HD.

Any help will be gratefully received.

semi-pro waster · 24 Mar 2006 at 13:02

I'd guess that he has SMART(Self Monitoring And Reportive Testing) on and this is now showing that the drive is about to die, replace it as soon as possible and backup whatever you can. Not a lot else to do

singist · 24 Mar 2006 at 13:39

Can't backup anything until he can access the disc .... it wont boot into safe mode either.

semi-pro waster · 24 Mar 2006 at 13:42

singist said:
Can't backup anything until he can access the disc .... it wont boot into safe mode either.

What I mean is that if you have a spare hard drive then install that and see if it can recognise the old hard drive and copy any files over from it.