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Question

Repair or replace hard disk alert message

Jan 3, 2016 12:49PM PST

I'm getting an alert saying that I need to repair or replace my hard disk and back up my laptop. I've already backed it up. My computer has been having some issues. I thouoght it was something I could fix myself. I had gotten a kernal_data_inpage_error a few time and I thought chkdsk had repaired it then I started to get the hard disk error. Sometimes my computer works fine and sometimes it's practically useless it goes so slow. Since I started getting the hard disk issue my computer has been running smoothly. Smoother then it usually does. What's up with that? I need this for work. Will it hurt anything if I keep using it as long as it's still running and then when it finally does just replace the hard drive? I was thinking about replacing the hard drive anyways to have more space on my computer. Also, could the warning be a false alarm and I might could fix it myself? My laptop is made very weird and the whole stinking paptop has to disassembled to swap out the hard drive unlike my old laptop where you can just unscrew the bottom and bam everything is. I just don't want to spend money on doing computer reapirs I could fix myself.

Discussion is locked

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Answer
Look at the SMART data. But if drive is Seagate, replace it.
Jan 3, 2016 12:57PM PST

Some Seagate models had close to a 40% failure rate in 2014. I haven't seen any data for 2015 yet, but I did have a 2.5 year one fail on me in a desktop.

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Answer
Windows errors messages don't lie.
Jan 4, 2016 6:21AM PST

They are designed to alert you. Your drive WILL fail in the near future.