Solved Can I use a smart error hard with a new good one?

Hi, my last hd gave up past week saying SMART error my pc became very slow. It was 1 tb sata seagate st31000520AS (16 mb cache I guess) bought 4 years ago I ran seatools on it and it said test failed... but it it still working as I write this and taking manual backup to the newly bought seagate 1 tb 64 mb cache hard.

So my question is should I run a surface test on old hard , wipe it and ust it as secondary hard ? (not booting from it) or should I pack it up and seek for possible repair?

Thanks

Hello Evil,

Personally, I would dump the hard drive. It's a time bomb waiting to implode.

You could use it since it's still working for now, but it will soon eventually fail causing you to lose anything saved on it when it does.

Thanks mate I'm not saving anything new in the old drive... and have a win8.1 usb ready as soon as it fails. What do you mean by timebomb?

A "timebomb" is a "developing and problematic situation which will eventually become dangerous if not addressed" according to google and it seems a good definition to me

If you aren't using the drive you may as well chuck it in the bin. If you are using it for anything you care about then you will lose your data when it (eventually) fails. It doesn't matter if you save new stuff (although that may speed the process) - when it fails whatever is on it now will be lost.

Ya I don't care about if it fails, and I'm not saving new data in old drive but in the new one..... I was asking if it could do any harm to the new hard disk or anything else in system ?

Evil Nemesis said:

Ya I don't care about if it fails, and I'm not saving new data in old drive but in the new one..... I was asking if it could do any harm to the new hard disk or anything else in system ?

Click to expand...

Look at SMART and see what exactly is failing. You may have problems with cables or voltage for instance and that could be fixed, Power failure while writing to it can also produce bad sectors of software kind and that could be fixed by rebuilding partition and reformatting.

okay tonight I will rebuilt it's partitions and format / wipe it using EASUS Partition Master

Evil Nemesis said:

okay tonight I will rebuilt it's partitions and format / wipe it using EASUS Partition Master

Click to expand...

You can also check partition with it.

you mean surface test ? will do , by the way magically system is booting normal now but bios is still saying SMART ERROR.... and sometimes when playing videos / opening folders it freezes for a sec or 2..... I'm gonna install win8.1 via usb to the new hard drive tomorrow no matter what.

Evil Nemesis said:

you mean surface test ? will do , by the way magically system is booting normal now but bios is still saying SMART ERROR.... and sometimes when playing videos / opening folders it freezes for a sec or 2..... I'm gonna install win8.1 via usb to the new hard drive tomorrow no matter what.

Click to expand...

Yes, surface test too. I suggest you install windows on the new drive first and do the tests and everything else to old drive from there. Disconnect old drive while you install windows and only after that reconnect the old drive, it's safer like that. I would also put new drive at the first SATA port.

Copy......

anyway here's the new hard I bought : Seagate Barracuda ST1000DM003 1TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive - Newegg.com

Thnanks alot.

Nice choice of HDD Evil.

By "timebomb", I meant that the old drive could fail and die on your at anytime without warning (other than the Smart error you're getting now), and lose all data on it. It won't have any affect on the new hard drive.

Sometimes, you may need to remove/disconnect a dead hard drive before the computer will boot though.

Brink said:

Nice choice of HDD Evil.

By "timebomb", I meant that the old drive could fail and die on your at anytime without warning (other than the Smart error you're getting now), and lose all data on it. It won't affect the new hard drive though.

Click to expand...

Are you clarifying that because of NSA ????

CountMike said:

Are you clarifying that because of NSA ????

Click to expand...

Shhh, they might be listening.

Well Brink it wasn't a choice actually but the only thing available at the budget I had, glad to know it has 64 mb cache.. I'm up and running win 8.1 on new HD now.. and tethering my moto atrix hd 3g (free trial here in our country) to update windows , install Kaspersky Internet Security, DirectX etc...

hmmm check the attached surface test of that old HD... even though partition wizard free said it has 0 bad sectors when I did a filesystem test.

Odd, but since it failed with SeaTools, I wouldn't trust the drive.

ya me too, I will only store the data in it for which I don't really care like ps3 games backups, movies etc... till it dies..

Thanks everyone... solved...