Tips: When you receive this error message, the bad news is your hard disk will fail sooner or later, the good news is you can use Free Backup Software to backup it in case of data loss.
The Scenario
"I have a HP Pavilion Notebook PC over 3 years old running Windows 7. I turned on my computer this morning and I got a warning during boot saying: Hard disk failure is imminent, and advises me to backup your hard disk and have it replaced! Press F10 for Setup, F2/F1 to continue. How can I fix this error?"
The warning message may be various based on different brands of computer and motherboards. The one you get may be "SMART failure predicted on hard disk". Before fix the error, you may ask how computer know hard disk failure is imminent.
SMART stands for Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology which is a firmware that resides into most modern hard disks (HDD) and solid-state drives (SSD) to continuously keep track of hard disk condition such as health, performance and error rates, and reports the problems to system. Then, what does hard drive imminent failure mean?
SMART uses a technology known as predictive failure analysis to warn you a hard drive failure is imminent, not an actual failure. The hard drive in your computer right now is not yet dead, but will be sooner or later. Could be in 1 hour, could be in a week. Who knows? Therefore, it is best to do something, just in case the hard disk failure does happen to you.
A SMART hard drive failure warning may come out for many different factors such as bad sectors, higher temperature, physical damage, etc. Then, how to fix?
The Solutions
Hard disk failure is a fact of life in the computer world. It's something many of us have experienced, and not with fond memories. As the SMART tell you: "Please backup your hard disk and have it replaced!" So let's follow its advice.
AOMEI Backupper Standard, a complete yet free backup software, lets you backup a hard disk to external hard drives, networked drives, NAS devices, USB flash drives. With AOMEI Backupper, you can easily restore system, programs and data on your hard drive that get damaged or deleted because of system crashes, hard disk failure or natural disasters, even when you cannot boot your Windows system.
The followings are step-by-step guide to walk you through the progress of backing up a hard disk that failure is imminent.
Step 1. Download, install and launch AOMEI Backupper. On the main window, select "Backup" -> "Disk Backup" as show below.
Step 2. Here you can choose the hard disk that failure is imminent and where to backup it. Also, you are allowed to configure disk backup settings by clicking "Backup Operations". Because you cannot predict the time of hard disk failure, it is highly recommended to click "Schedule" to set up automatic hard disk backup via daily, weekly or monthly.
Step 3. You are almost done. The last step is to click "Start Backup".
The Conclusion
The best practice for failing hard disk is that no matter whether you have got or will get hard drive failure imminent warning, backing up your hard disk regularly is a good habit to prevent system crash and data loss. Once the hard disk eventually failed, you can replace it with a new disk and perform disk restore. If your system will not allow you to boot into windows to create a backup, you can create a bootable media on other computers.
If you want to protect unlimited computers within your company, you can pick AOMEI Backupper Technician. With the inbuilt AOMEI Image Deploy tool, you are also allowed to deploy/restore system image file on server-side computer to multiple client-side computers over network.