HDD SMART errors and slow access

[gentoo]

I have a Western Digital 200GB WD2000JB IDE drive that replaced its previously dead model that I inadvertently killed with jumpers. Now this one is starting to give me some SMART errors whenever booting into Windows. What happened is something like this:

I wake up this morning to my computer and my cable modem off, not sure why since the power didn't go out last night, my thoughts were maybe the power-strip is starting to suck, who knows? But anyway, I booted up fine, did all of my nonsense, then tried running Oblivion and next thing I knew my system was starting to halt, not responding. I had to hard restart the system and that's when the BIOS started halting on the HDD checks, it reported that my IDE drive might be failing, so I went ahead, booted up again, HDD didn't show in the device manager, I refreshed, there it was, partitions said healthy but I couldn't read anything on it since all it would do is search. I shutdown safely and unplugged the drive for now.

Does anyone know if the drive might be alright enough to try and salvage the data before it's too late? I'd really, really, hate to lose my shit again. Thanks.

 

[venm11]

I had one of those 2000JBs... they were pretty notorious about failing (and mine did as well). The first thing you should do is get WD's drive diagnostics utility and run that. I don't remember if it gives you the smart errors, but there are utilities around that will do that, that might tell you what's going on.

Um....... I don't understand why your cable modem would have been off if the power didn't go out. You should http into it and check the network and system uptime to see if it actually powered back up when you think it did, or just disconnected.

The HD... it could be failing, or could be cables or PSU. You could also try plugging it into another computer and see if it's stable long enough for you to back up your shiznit that way. Mine had actually failed in a cheap external USB enclosure; I've always suspected that the cheap PSU on that burned out the electronics (the pcb) somehow. The PCB can be replaced, assuming you get the *exact* same model.

You can also turn smart off in Bios, which might let you use the thing for recovery purposes. Come to think of it, I had one old drive that worked fine with the smart turned off for quite a long time.

 

[gentoo]

Thanks for your response.

But yeah, I was reading earlier on here that SMART is more often than not wrong in many respects. I might as well just disable SMART checking in my BIOS and run the diagnostics like you said. I thought for a second that it might be my rounded IDE cable going on me or something since Windows was having a bit of a hard time reading the contents of the partition. I don't know but I will certainly try plugging the drive into another system as well. If the drive turns out to be fine I will certainly be making time to buy an external backup drive and a new internal.

Time to go grab the latest Ultimate Boot CD!