Hard Disk Failure is Imminent -Fixed for Windows 7/8/10

User case: hard disk failure is imminent please backup

“When starting my computer, I sometimes get a message, saying, ‘Hard disk failure is imminent. Please back up your hard disk and have it replaced. Press F10 for Setup. F2 to continue.’

The first time I got this screen it clicked on F2, Windows opened and all seemed fine. But now my computer run into the same issues: A black screen with same message, but the F2 key is not working when I click on it.

Is the drive really dying? But I don’t have a backup for my hard disk yet. What can I do to save this situation or am I just out of luck? Any assistance will be appreciated, thanks.”

Overview of hard disk failure is imminent

“Hard disk failure is imminent” error is a common issue reported by SMART in different computers, such as, HP, ASUS, Lenovo, etc. It’s also called “SMART failure predicted on hard disk", “SMART check Failure”, “SMART Hard Drive detects imminent failure”, etc.

SMART, Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology, is a firmware that resides into most modern hard disks (HDD) and solid-state drives (SSD), which can continuously keep track of hard disk condition such as health, performance and error rates. In addition, it still has a technology known as predictive failure analyst that can report the problems to system when your hard disk is in trouble.

So, when hard disk detects imminent failure, you may receive one of the above error messages according to your computer and its motherboard.

What does hard disk failure imminent mean?

When your computer says hard disk failure imminent, it means your hard drive right now is not yet dead, but will be sooner or later. It's just a matter of time. It could be in 1 hour, could be in a week. Who knows?

And A SMART hard drive failure may come out for many different factors such as bad sectors, higher temperature, physical damage, virus, etc. So far, there is no reliable way to prevent.

So, you need to follow the prompts to backup your hard disk and have it replaced. Otherwise, in the future, you may loss some of your important files, or your entire dive may stop working completely.

How to fix “hard disk failure is imminent”?

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 do as suggests.

Need a trust and reliable backup and restore software

To minimize data loss of a disk with “smart hard disk error imminent failure”, the first thing to backup your drive or just important files. At this point, you need a trust and reliable backup and restore software like AOMEI Backupper Standard.

This software is very easy to use, even for beginners. Because it has clear interface, user friendly design and all the steps of this software are fixed. So, you can backup hard drive or data to external hard drives, networked drives, NAS devices, USB flash drives easily and quickly.

Besides, this software still offers you some features that can bring you convenience, such as, encryption, compression, splitting, intelligent sector backup, etc.

• Encryption: If there are any sensitive data on the disk, you can enable encryption for backups.

• Compression: If your disk is very large, you can choose to compress image file with “Normal” or ”High” compression level.

• Splitting: If you don’t have a big enough disk, you can split the large image file into multiple smaller image files and save it to different storage devices.

• Intelligent sector backup: This feature will only backup the used sectors of file systems and reduce the size of image file and its backup time.

Backup your hard disk and have it replaced

The followings are step-by-step guide to walk you through the progress of backing up a drive with hard disk failure imminent error.

Step 1. Download, install and launch AOMEI Backupper. On the main window, select "Backup" -> "Disk Backup" as show below. To backup files, click “File Backup” as instead.

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Step 2. Click “Add Disk”, then select the disk with SMART hard disk failure imminent and click “OK” to exit.

Step 3. Click where the arrow point and select an external hard drive, USB flash drive, network drive or NAS as storage device. Then, click "Start Backup".

Note:
• You are allowed to configure disk backup settings by clicking "Options", and select compress level, encryption, intelligent sector backup , etc.
• Also, it is highly recommended to schedule backup hard disk via “Schedule”. Because you cannot predict the time of hard disk failure. You can use daily, weekly, monthly, USB plug in, Event triggers, incremental or differential backup, and more schedule settings.

Step 4. After the process 100% ends, you can restore the disk image to another hard disk and boot from it.

Just connect another hard disk to the computer, open this backup and restore software, click “Restore” and “Select Image File” to find the image file, tick “Restore the entire disk ”, then select the connected hard disk as destination and click “Start Restore”.

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 hard drive and perform disk restore. If hard disk failure is imminent and your computer won’t boot, you can create a bootable media on other computers.